In KS2, students will begin discovering the exciting history of how the world transitioned from the ice age to the world the Romans lived in. Exciting stories about artefacts like Cheddar Man and Stonehenge are not only an important part of English heritage. They give children a thrilling insight into what was happening in our country thousands of years ago.
With these Stone Age to Iron Age KS2 teaching ideas, your students won’t have a single dull history lesson.
Lesson Activities
Make a guide on how to survive the Stone Age/Iron Age: task the students with each writing a guide to surviving the Stone Age. What did stone and Iron Age people have to wear? What were the dangers to look out for? How did they get food? This could easily be a task for individual work or group activity.
Write a log book from a hunter's or gatherer's perspective, including daily entries about what life is like and what you have found or caught. Gatherers might want to draw the food they’ve found, and hunters could sketch the animals they are tracking.
Write a script for a TV advert for a Stone Age or Iron Age tool and act the advert out in front of the class.
Horrible Histories has some funny and creative videos that can help your students get their imaginations going.
Our Stone Age Artefacts Pack is full of high-quality prop tools you can use in your adverts to help kids get into the activity.
Create a standing stone circle out of biscuits. If you manage to prevent any standing stone from being eaten, task the students with creating their very own standing stone circle, practising standing biscuits up and balancing them on top of one another.
Our Bronze Age Village Kit is a great resource for helping kids learn about how people created a shelter in the stone, iron, and bronze ages. This is a pack of 30, so everyone in the class has the opportunity to make one.
Learn about Stone Age maths. Use this nrich activity as a jumping-off point to learn about how Stone Age people counted and what they might have needed to count for. Try to devise new counting methods or ask the students to think of their own.
Look at some animals from the Stone to Iron Age. How did they evolve to survive in their habitats? Task each student with ‘discovering’ and inventing a new Stone Age animal and drawing a diagram of it, complete with a log of information on what the animal eats and how it survives.
Design a Stone Age outfit. What kinds of clothes would someone living in Stone Age Britain need? What materials would be around, and how would they be put together? Use a multipack like our faux fur fabrics pack of 8 as pretend animal hides.
Complete your history module with our Stone Age to Iron Age Thinking Cards and Stone Age to Iron Age History Display Pack. Check out our article Stone Age Teaching Resources for links to useful websites and free-to-download material online.
Get inspired by the Historical Association's resources for teaching about the Stone Age.
Field Trips
Take advantage of the rich heritage preserved in the UK and give your students an immersive experience with a field trip.
Stonehenge
We’re lucky enough to have the most famous standing stone circle in the world in our country, so it’s hard to resist the idea of a field trip if your school is situated close enough. English Heritage manages school visits to Stonehenge and offers free self-led visits to the site, which can be supported by their free-to-download resources. Otherwise, it's possible to book a hands-on, expert-led discovery visit.
Stonehenge visiting and booking information.
Cheddar Gorge
Cheddar Gorge is the discovery site of Cheddar Man, the oldest complete human skeleton found in Britain, dating back to 7150 BC. The gorge and caves are not only a fascinating origin of some of Britain’s best-preserved prehistory but also a site of outstanding natural beauty (not to mention the home of Cheddar cheese).
Download useful education packs about Stone Age Cheddar Gorge for KS1 to KS5, including information about Cheddar Man. Youth groups get certain bonuses when visiting the gorge and caves, including free parking and free adult tickets for every ten children.
Cheddar Gorge visiting information.
Celtic Harmony Camp
This astonishing camp is the largest Iron Age reconstructed settlement in a woodland setting, complete with seven roundhouses. Kids can enjoy being fully immersed in the Stone to Iron Age with activities like longbow shooting, gathering food and cooking outside, and first-hand learning about life in ancient Britain.
Celtic Harmony Camp school day trip information.
Plan a School Trip
English Heritage is the best place to find Stone to Iron Age sites for field trips, looking after over 60 individual sites across the country. Search a location, filter by facilities and type (prehistoric), or view all the sites on a map.
If you want to find places to visit near your school that fit into your Stone to Iron Age module, Plan My School Trip is the ideal website. Input your school details, the preferred date of your trip, the duration, and the number of students and staff to get quotes for trips in your area.
Stone Age Day
Celebrate everything you’ve learned with a dedicated Stone Age Day. Invite students to come to school and visit a classroom transported back in time thousands of years. Help lock in everything your students have learned by encouraging them to role-play and take part in ancient activities, games, and a special lunch.
Here’s a rough guide for everything you could include in your Stone Age Day.
- Invite children to come to school in Stone Age costumes. Here are some fantastic examples from Great Binfields Primary.
- Decorate the classroom the day before so that when the children arrive, they will be able to step back in time and enter the Stone Age classroom. Ideas for classroom decor could be:
- Making a pretend campfire in the middle of the classroom and scattering animal bones around it.
- Covering furniture in camouflage netting to create bushes and grassland. You could even cover some tables up and make a cave.
- Grabbing some ‘animal fur’ scatter cushions for your reading corner and other comfy areas.
- Putting on some nature sound effects to complete the atmosphere.
- Have some fun activities ready for your students to get into the Stone Age zone. Try our activities listed above. You could use Stone Age Day to perform and show off work completed in lessons beforehand.
- Prepare a stone and Iron Age lunch. This could involve eating outside or even cooking outside! Your feast could include cold cooked meats, nuts, berries, honey, eggs, dandelion leaves, and nettle tea (all gathered from the wild of course!)
Pick up some of our Stone Age to Iron Age Snap cards to help solidify new knowledge in your students' minds from their lessons on the Stone to Iron Age.
