It’s finally November! We’ve survived Hallowe’en (on a school night, no less) and we’re looking forward to Bonfire Night. The kids are a little sad that the pumpkin-fest is officially over, so we wanted to do something fun* to recover from the sugar slump. (*This essentially means “no workbooks”, so it was straight over to Twinkl for help.)

We already know something about Guy Fawkes, but we decided to brush up on our knowledge with The Gunpowder Plot from Twinkl PlanIt. It’s actually intended for KS1, so we worked through the first 3 lessons in one session. (If you wanted to pace it slower, you could focus solely on the Higher Ability worksheets and use the extension activity suggestions.)

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Worksheets from lessons 1-3 of PlanIt The Gunpowder Plot.

The first lesson is Who Was Guy Fawkes. We watched the presentation, learned a few facts about Guy Fawkes, and discussed differences and similarities between then and now. As my children are KS2, we used the HA worksheet to select the historical items Guy Fawkes could have used.

The second lesson is Problems for the Plotters. Another presentation, to spark discussion of Bonfire Night and information about the mysterious letter to Lord Monteagle. Again, we used the HA worksheet to write down some of the things we might have said if we were the plotters.

The third lesson is The End of the Plot. We used the presentation to go through what we remembered from the previous two lessons, and summarised the various points. As we were running out of time, we used the Lower Ability worksheets to create our Gunpowder Plot story booklets. (I told my elder child to add any text she wanted to include, under the pictures.)

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Story books made with The Gunpowder Plot Sequencing Cards and Mini Booklet Template.

Some of the other things we did today included independent reading, and Khan Academy for Maths and JavaScript Programming. However, the Gunpowder Plot lessons will resume later this week. (There are 6 lessons for each PlanIt topic.) I shall use it as an excuse to do some Bonfire Night themed artwork, which should make my kids happy.