August blog: Back to School
Saturday 24 August 2024
An image from the BBC programe Atomic People (see below)
Back to School
We hope that those of you returning to school in August after the long vacation have had a restful time!
If you are teaching first year IGCSE History students, don't forget that we have a 'Getting Started' section for students. This gives them an overview of the course and assessment and how to use the online textbook.
(You can get full access on this site for your students as part of your subscription - see this page for how to do this).
If you are a new teacher to this website, we also have a 'Getting started' section for teachers.
August anniversaries
One way to start off the school year is to look at some of the key anniversaries of this month - either to introduce students to these topics, or to review them.
Students could be encourage to investigate any of the events below and to see how the anniversary has been covered in the media in different countries. This is also a good opportunity to create a display on these anniversaries and/or do an assembly.
80 years ago this August:
Aug 1944 – Anne Frank and family arrested and sent to Bergen Belsen
Aug 1944 – Warsaw Uprising
70 years ago this August:
Aug 1954 – Gulf of Tonkin – and war in Vietnam
50 years ago this August:
1974 – Richard Nixon resigns as president re Watergate
Site update: Core Option A
You may have noticed that we are currently adding the topics for Core Option A of this IGCSE course.
We have both taught this 19th Century option for IGCSE and we found it a great way of broadening out student knowledge beyond 20th Century topics - particularly for those students who then go on to do mainly 20th Century history for IB or A level. It is also more thematic (rather than chronological) in approach covering a range of issues and continents - civil War in America, liberalism and nationalism in Europe, imperialism in Asia and Africa. This makes it an interesting course to teach and also to study. The themes of nationalism and imperialism in Europe come together in the final topic on the causes of the First World War.
We will aim to finish this for end of September and hope it will inspire some of you to consider this option!
New TV resources
There is a new series on Netflix on Hitler, Hitler and the Nazis: Evil on Trial ' a mixture of re-enactments, talking heads and a narrative that stretches from the end of the first world war to the Nuremberg trials'
Linking back to important anniversaries, August 6th is the anniversary of the dropping of the first Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima in 1945. If you can access BBC, Atomic People is a 'must watch' programme focuses on the testimony of some of the last ‘Hibakusha’ - survivors of the two atomic bombs. A last chance to hear the voices of those who actually experienced these moments of horror.
It combines footage from the time with the testimony of the survivors.
BBC Two - Atomic People (BBC)
A film that explores the human cost of atomic bombs used in wartime. As the Dan Einav in the FT writes 'By confronting us with the horrors of what they experiened the hibakusha provide us with the most urgent unflinching and unequivocal warning possible about where nuclear escalation may lead'