Great Fire of London word bank for KS1

The Great Fire of London is named in the KS1 history curriculum as an example of an event beyond living memory, and it suits young children because it has a clear beginning, middle and end. It started in Thomas Farriner’s bakery on Pudding Lane in the early hours of Sunday 2 September 1666 and burned for about four days. That shape makes it easy to sequence, retell and write about, and the word mat is organised to support exactly those three things.

Keep the focus on what happened to the city and how people helped each other. A gentle time-travel story set just after the fire, in which the hero helps a child find a lost cat and sees people working together to rebuild, keeps the topic calm and still carries the history.

The most important question in the topic is why the fire spread so far, and children can answer it with three adjectives from the mat: wooden, narrow and dry. The houses were made of timber, the streets were narrow so the houses almost touched, and the summer had been dry. Add the noun wind (a strong wind blew from the east) and children have a full explanation in their own words.

A simple demonstration helps: line up cardboard boxes close together and far apart and ask which row a fire could jump along more easily. Then ask pupils to write one “because” sentence using a word from the mat. “The fire spread because the houses were wooden” is a real historical explanation, and it uses the vocabulary on purpose.

Diary is one of the topic words because so much of what we know comes from Samuel Pepys, who wrote about the fire as it happened. He recorded people carrying their belongings to the river, and he buried some of his own precious things, including a large cheese, in his garden to keep them safe. Children love that detail, and it opens a good question: how do we know what happened 360 years ago? Because people wrote it down.

Reading a short, simplified extract and then writing a diary entry is the classic writing task for this topic. Give pupils the verbs on the mat for the actions (rush, carry, escape, watch) and the adjectives for the senses (hot, smoky, orange). A good KS1 diary entry has a day, “I”, things that happened in order and one feeling.

Rebuild and cathedral lead into how London changed. St Paul’s Cathedral was badly damaged and Sir Christopher Wren designed the new one, which still stands. After the fire, new buildings in the city were made of brick and stone rather than timber. A “then and now” sort, with pictures of 1666 London and London today, lets children use bucket, cart and boat for then and talk about what we have instead now, such as fire engines and hoses.

The Monument, near the site of the bakery, was built to remember the fire. If your class cannot visit, a photograph and the fact that it is 202 feet tall, the same as its distance from where the fire started, is a memorable link between numbers and history.

Some children worry about fires at home, so end the topic by linking it to safety today: smoke alarms, fire engines and firefighters. Many schools invite a local fire service visit during this topic. It turns flee and escape into calm, practical words about knowing what to do.