One of the fastest ways to lose confidence when studying a period in depth is to feel uncertain about ‘who’s who’. Feeling that you don’t know why x is important or who’s on whose side niggles away at students’ confidence, undermining other efforts to learn. Therefore getting a rapid grip on Who’s Who is vital for students, whether it’s at A level or in one of the new GCSE Depth and Period studies.

The attached textbook page (See Resource File, Page 12) provides an activity designed to help students overcome this problem. It’s the layout of individuals that’s important, grouping people by role (councillors in one group, seafarers in another, Catholic plotters in a third, near to the Pope and Philip II of Spain) and all revolving around the central character of Queen Elizabeth I. Similar layouts work for any topic.

Alternatively this link (HERE …) takes you to an activity which transfers the layout of this page into the classroom, creating a human diagram in which each student play the part of the individuals.

Family trees can also be a stumbling block for students – it is helpful to turn a tree drawn on a page into a human tree with students taking the roles. The physicality of this helps both understanding and memory. In addition create family trees at specific dates (good for revision too) by asking:

What would the Angevin family have looked like in ... 1173, 1182, 1189, 1200?

or

What would Henry VIII’s family tree look like in 1529, 1534, 1537 etc?

And take photographs of the resulting trees for students to annotate for revision.