Starter activities for study packages

Starters are designed to provide a quick, engaging entry point to the investigations that follow. As you will see from the index, the starter activities come in two formats. The interactive photo and video Flash starters offer an interesting visual piece of history to engage students' attention in the topic. The Excel datasets provide a wealth of information that can be manipulated by the teacher to produce graphs relevant to the topics discussed in class.

There are a number of features of the starter resources that are worth noting:

• They are visual, making them engaging in contrast to the text-based Cabinet paper sources
• They attempt to build up the human dimension, showing how ordinary people might have perceived big decisions and events taking place around them
• They have a direct connection with the Cabinet papers - the events they refer to are also referred to in the investigation source

Taking it further

The principle of a starter resource is a very simple one. The Cabinet papers contain thousands of sources, many of which are well suited to use as starter resources, particularly if used with a source from a different media (similar to the General Strike starter). You can link relevant source material to particular topics by using the Browse by Theme or search functions.