On this page
- Prescribed sources
- Chapter 1 – Cleopatra as Queen of Egypt
- Chapter 2 – Cleopatra’s Relationship with Julius Caesar 48-44BC
- Chapter 3 – Cleopatra’s Relationship with Mark Antony 41-30BC
- Chapter 4 – The Battle of Actium and its Significance for Egypt & Rome
- Cleopatra – Revision
- Cleopatra – Quizzes
We will be following the lessons created by the Warwick Classic Network. I’ll abbreviate this to WCN throughout.
We’ll be working on exam technique very early on so I’ll be adding this into the WCN framework.
Prescribed sources
We feel pretty comfortable with studying prescribed sources after doing GCSE Classical Civilisation. The list for Ancient History, however, is a heck of a lot longer!
I’ve therefore put together a list of prescribed sources for this Cleopatra unit so we can tick them off as we meet them chapter-by-chapter and so we can actually find them in the OCR source booklet too.
Here it is, with a preview beneath, in case it’s useful for you too:
Ancient History GCSE Cleopatra – Prescribed sources checklist and index (Google Sheet)
Ancient History GCSE Cleopatra – Prescribed sources checklist and index (Excel doc)
Chapter 1 – Cleopatra as Queen of Egypt
WCN – Lesson 1: Heritage and Upbringing
As part of my planning, and I do this for every lesson, I print out two copies of the two-slide handout; one for my planning and one for Peggy’s file. I then annotate my copy with any activities I want to add in or take out.
We worked our way through the PowerPoint presentation for lesson 1 with the following adjustments:
- Slide 6 – when annotating the family tree, we also included how each person died
- Slide 6 – the “summaries” referred to are the “Family Tree Scans” in pdf format which are next to the lesson 1 PowerPoint on the WCN website.
- Slide 8 – Plutarch is on page 14 not 9 of the OCR booklet
WCN – Lesson 2: First years as Queen
We followed the Lesson 2 PowerPoint presentation with the following changes:
- Slide 4 – we used single words to complete the box on the challenges faced by Cleopatra and instead did more detailed notes on a spider diagram as there’s a lot to say on this topic.
- Slide 6 – we also discussed which sibling had the best relationship with Cleopatra.
- Slide 7 – we left out the Plutarch exam question at this stage and instead looked at this at the end of the chapter when we worked on exam technique.
WCN – Lesson 3: Cleopatra’s character
We followed the Lesson 3 PowerPoint presentation with the following additions:
- Before looking at slide 4, we watched and made notes on The Wheel of Sources video by Stupid Ancient History. This goes through each of the authors of the prescribed sources and discusses their strengths and weaknesses: it’s basically analysing the accuracy of their writings.
- We then returned to complete slide 4 but didn’t do the exam practice question yet; we’ll come back to that later.
WCN – Lesson 4: The presentation of Cleopatra and her Patron Goddess
We followed the Lesson 4 PowerPoint presentation with the following additions:
- For slide 3, to help with the Venn diagram, we used page 4 of the Cleopatra revision booklet on the WCN website which lists all the common features in a box.
Chapter 2 – Cleopatra’s Relationship with Julius Caesar 48-44BC
Coming soon…
Chapter 3 – Cleopatra’s Relationship with Mark Antony 41-30BC
Coming soon…
Chapter 4 – The Battle of Actium and its Significance for Egypt & Rome
Coming soon…
Cleopatra – Revision
Coming soon…
Cleopatra – Quizzes
Coming soon…
