Black History Month is coming up and it’s the perfect time to acknowledge and celebrate the black people in your community’s culture, history and achievements with your class.

Understanding and celebrating the diverse cultures of students in your class is key to making everyone feel supported and included, making school and learning more enjoyable, so we wanted to share a few ideas on getting your students involved this month.

Sketches and songs

For primary schools, a great way to keep your students engaged is through videos! The BBC have a 10-minute video with sketches and songs from the show Horrible Histories. The video covers important historical black figures such as Rosa Parks, Mary Bowser, Bill Richmond and Martin Luther King. The clip was originally made to celebrate Black History Month and is a fun entertaining way to introduce your class to some amazing people. 

Get reading

With a shifting focus in a majority of our schools to improving literacy and reading after school closures, we like to recommend reading with your class whenever we can so what better way to do so than with Black History Month books? For older children, the book ‘Black and British’ by David Olusoga gives a great overview of black history all the way up to 2021 and the book ‘My first heroes: Black History’ is a perfect introduction for your younger pupils.

After-school cinema club

There are a ton of great films that explore black history. For all of the budding film buffs in your secondary school why not host an after-school cinema club showing one film a week? Some of our personal favourites are Selma (2014), Hidden Figures (2016) and Harriette (2019). All of these films have a 12+ age rating and do explore a few difficult scenes so be sure to pre-warn your students.

Classroom resources

The BBC have an array of different classroom resources to use in your lessons for both primary and secondary schools covering key historical moments and people within black history. Also, the national education union has posters and teaching packs you can download. 

This month is a great way to highlight the history of an underrepresented group and inspire cultural understanding and tolerance in the children you teach. We recruit for supply and permanent school staff roles so if you’re looking to celebrate Black History Month in a new class this year then get in touch.