CurriculumTeaching Ideas

Knowledge Rich resources that are free

5 free ways to get knowledge rich materials into your classroom.

The Knowledge Rich curriculum needs both pupils and teachers to have the right knowledge in place. Access to detailed, accurate, information is essential to embedding this into lessons and learning. With budgets tight and the cost of stocking up on reference materials prohibitive, we’ve looked for solutions to the problem. Clearly, you can use sites such as ours that are aimed at students, for breadth, academic and archives, here are five of the best free sources of the additional knowledge resources available for a knowledge rich history classroom.

Knowledge Rich History Classroom

The Wellcome Trust provide teaching packs for History and STEM subjects from Primary upwards. They’re one of the biggest funders of research and resources out there and also have vast online image collections. Wellcome materials are rooted in research and are knowledge rich throughout.

You want access to knowledge rich reference material written by the brightest minds? The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is exactly that. Incredibly expensive, unless you log in using a local library service card number. Then, its free.

Academic research too hard to access. Journals too costly to justify when not every article is of use? JSTOR is a search engine for these. It provides a free daily summary e-mail and you can access a limited number of articles each month by signing in through social media.

The British Library caters for all ages and subject matter. They have activity packs based on their materials as well as excellent blogs on a wide range of topics.

BBC History Magazine. You may think I’m suggesting expenditure here, I’m not. Most local library services subscribe to its digital edition. Accessing it may vary but for myself I’d log into my local library service website and the magazine is available with plenty of other titles. Some articles are free to access without library card facilities, on History Extra.

Knowledge Rich online communities

Finally a 6th. The community of history teachers and history lovers. Invaluable. You can join our community on facebook here.There are currently over 2800 followers of our page who contribute to discussions on our page and in our discussion group. On a daily basis we run knowledge based quizzes, often requiring research. There’s a range of articles shared every day between 10am and 10pm (UK time) providing up to date information and history related news.

These materials help with lessons for both Primary History lessons and Secondary History lessons. They cover British History as well as European and World Histories. You can access other recommended Primary History sites and apps here.

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