Stone Age word bank for KS2

The KS2 history statement is about changes in Britain from the Stone Age to the Iron Age, and the key word is changes. The period covers many thousands of years, so pupils need a sense of scale before they need facts. A washing-line timeline across the classroom, with “today” at one end and the Roman invasion in AD 43 near it, makes the point: the Stone Age takes up almost all of the line. Pin the words from the mat to the line where they belong, and pupils will see that hunter-gatherer sits early, farming and roundhouses later, and bronze and hill forts towards the end.

Prehistoric and archaeologist are the two topic words that frame the whole unit. Prehistoric means before people wrote things down, so pupils should keep asking: if nobody wrote it down, how do we know? The answer is the archaeologist, who studies the objects people left behind.

The biggest change in the period is from hunting and gathering to farming. Early Stone Age people were nomadic: they moved with the seasons, following herds of reindeer and other animals and foraging for plants. Farming reached Britain around 6,000 years ago, in the New Stone Age, and with it came settlements, pottery and monuments. Pupils can sort the verbs on the mat into “hunter-gatherer” and “farmer” columns; hunt, gather and forage go on one side, and farm, herd, settle and weave go on the other.

Skara Brae in Orkney is a brilliant case study for this change. It is a New Stone Age village of stone houses, with stone dressers, beds and hearths that are still there. Photographs of it show pupils that Stone Age people had homes, furniture and organised lives, which corrects the cartoon picture of everyone living in caves.

Words like “primitive” and “caveman” creep into pupils’ writing from cartoons. It is worth talking about why historians avoid them: Stone Age people were skilful, knew their landscape in detail and made tools and art that took real expertise. The adjectives on the mat are chosen to describe those skills accurately. Skilful, sharp and sturdy describe the work; rough and chilly describe the conditions without making the people sound less clever than us.

The same goes for the most famous misconception of all: people did not live at the same time as dinosaurs. The dinosaurs had gone tens of millions of years before the first humans. Woolly mammoths, on the other hand, did live alongside early people in Britain.

Henge and monument lead into Stonehenge, built and rebuilt in stages from around 5,000 years ago. Nobody knows for certain what it was for, which makes it a good subject for reasoning: pupils can suggest uses and support them with evidence, such as the way the stones line up with the sun at the midsummer and midwinter solstices.

Bronze and hill fort take the topic to its end. The Bronze Age began when people learned to make tools from metal, and the Iron Age brought stronger iron tools and large hilltop settlements protected by banks and ditches. Ask pupils what difference a metal tool would make to a farmer, and they will explain why the change mattered.

A calm Stone Age adventure works well: helping a settlement prepare for winter by finding flint, building a roundhouse and painting a cave wall. For writing lessons, a “day in the life” recount works well, and pupils can only use objects that existed at the time. That rule makes them check the word mat and think like historians.