# data[].attributes.body
This is a teaching resource for a Year 2 classroom based around the Great Fire of London and the events that took place before, during and after the Great Fire. Each lesson follows on from the previous looking at a different aspect of the fire. In lesson 1, the theme is based around the story of the Great Fire of London so the children have a basic understanding of what happened. Lesson 2 focuses on London and its people in 1666 before the fire looking at their houses and jobs. Lesson 3 allows children to recreate the Great Fire and think about the people's feelings involved in it. To conclude, the last lesson focuses on London after the fire and the strategies used to ensure this did not happen again.

# data[].attributes.body
Children to be provided with this information sheet and will be told its the 350th anniversary of the Great Fire. Children to discuss the memorial in the picture. Possible questions include:
i) Why is it there?
ii) Do you think it is important to remember this event? Why?
iii) Why is the Great Fire of London still so significant today?
Children will then create a Google Doodle to celebrate the anniversary of the Great Fire.

# data[].attributes.body
This shows a map of London after the Great Fire. Possible questions to discuss include: What do you notice about the houses? What do you think might have happened to the houses on the other side of the river if anything? Would they be safe? Why/Why not? When looking at the streets children should consider how wide they are, is this safe? Create a class list about how to make the streets of London safer: consider, roads, houses and their materials, make London streets cleaner. Children to then pretend to be the King and must create a poster on what guidelines the people must follow when rebuilding a new house to make London safer.

# data[].attributes.body
The children will consider the danger that the old streets of London posed for its people and think of ways to make them safer before celebrating its 350th anniversary.

Resource 1 - Children to be shown 2 maps of London: 1 before the Great Fire and 1 after. What differences do they notice between the two maps in terms of housing? What do the streets look like? Discussion to take place on carpet with talk partner.

# data[].attributes.body
This is a fire squirt used during the Great Fire. The children must explain what these artefacts are when they come to present their freeze frame. Possible questions include:
i) What else did you use to extinguish the Great Fire?
ii) Did these objects work well?
iii? What do you think could have worked better?

# data[].attributes.body
The children can use the following 2 artefacts to identify what they are and whether they would have been helpful in putting out the Great Fire.

This resource is a bucket used to help extinguish the Great Fire.

# data[].attributes.headline
Group 5 (Battling the Inferno) - Resource 1

# data[].attributes.subject
Group 5 (Battling the Inferno) - Resource 1

# data[].attributes.body
The children can use this sheet along with the other resources to create a freeze frame considering questions such as:
i) What do you think the best way to stop the fire is?
ii) What did the King say when you told him the news?
Children can think of questions for Samuel Pepy's and the King in this scenario as they both feature in it.

# data[].attributes.body
This painting can also be used for children to recreate a freeze frame from or they could use it to think of their own scene to create ensuring they think of possible questions such as:
i) What is your priority right now?
ii) Did you know this was going to happen?
iii) Where are you going to go?

# data[].attributes.body
The children look at the following 2 pieces of art work and must re create a scene they can see from it. Possible questions include:
i) How are you feeling?
ii) What are you doing?
iii) What do you think is happening to your city?

# data[].attributes.body
These are some of the things people saved from the Great Fire. The children can use this picture to work out what some of the items were and if they would have chosen the same items.

# data[].attributes.body
The children use this to recreate their freeze frame of saving their belongings. Possible questions to arise for children to answer could include:
i) What are your most prized possessions you must save?
ii) What are the ways in which your belongings can be saved?

# data[].attributes.body
An extract from Samuel Pepy's diary on 2nd September. There is a transcript online for the children to translate what is being said. This diary entry can help the children get into the role of the character and how he felt when he heard about the Great Fire.

# data[].attributes.headline
Group 2 (The Blaze Spreads) - Resource 1

# data[].attributes.subject
Group 2 (The Blaze Spreads) - Resource 1

# data[].attributes.body
The children use this to recreate their freeze frame with possible questions such as:
i) What has your maid just told you?
ii) What do you suggest doing to stop the fire?
iii) How are you feeling? (Maid)

# data[].attributes.body
Bread oven. The children must work out what it is and why it is relevant to their scenario before explaining this to the rest of the class.

# data[].attributes.body
The children are put into groups of 6. Each group is  given 2 resources from a different part of the fire that they must use to create a freeze frame for. When presenting their scenario, they must explain which scenario they had and be prepared to answer questions from their peers.

Group 1 ( The Fire Begins) - The children use this sheet to recreate their freeze frame thinking about possible questions such as:
i) How are you feeling?
ii) How did the fire start?
iii) Was it your fault?

# data[].attributes.body
The children use this four oak bracket resource in conjunction with the video to help work out what it is and why it was used during this time. This helps to answer the same question as the previous resource above.

From this the children then use this information they have gathered about London before the Great Fireto create an acrostic poem of the word LONDON.

# data[].attributes.body
This video will help children to answer the question: What were the streets and houses like in London in 1666? What were they made of? How are they similar and different to the houses we live in today?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The man responsible for English history's most famous conflagration was sitting on a concrete wall and holding up two burnt pies. He wore a baker's white hat and had soot smudges on his cheeks. "Higher," said the photographer, and Thomas Farriner - for it was he - lifted his pies to London skies. I came across this impersonator of the bungling baker whilst paying my own homage to the Great Fire of London, which started in Farriner's shop 350 years ago this summer.

The precise date was September 2 1666 and the Museum of London is marking the anniversary with a major exhibition, entitled Fire! Fire!, which opens today . It's a cleverly judged show with plenty of atmosphere and interactive elements for children (the fire features prominently in the national curriculum) as well as more meaty scholarship in the form of original letters, maps and poignant artefacts such as pitifully tiny leather fire buckets and someone's charred Bible.

Credit: Getty

The museum is also offering guided walks through the streets consumed by the flames and I was enjoying a special preview walk, guided by the curator of the exhibition, Meriel Jeater, when we encountered the Farriner lookalike in Pudding Lane. We had started the walk at the Monument, the classic Doric column designed by Wren and built in the 1670s to commemorate the fire that, according to the inscription on its base, "...rushed devastating through every quarter with astonishing swiftness and noise..." (though, officially at least, it claimed just a handful of human lives).

The height of the Monument (202ft) and its location are such that if you were to topple it in an easterly direction, and burly giants in hard hats were to lower it gently to the ground, its top would come to rest on the site of Farriner's bakery, now an expanse of tarmac where Pudding Lane meets Monument Street. The exhibition re-creates Pudding Lane as a sort of three-dimensional 17th-century woodcut, complete with original hanging shop signs, while an audio-visual display illustrates the moment when the fire sparked into life in the early hours of Sunday September 2 1666.

At the site itself, Jeater set the scene: "There was a storm blowing from the east. London was really dry because there'd been a drought. Pudding Lane was full of warehouses with combustible things so the fire had a strong foothold from the beginning and the weather conditions just exacerbated it."

During late 20th-century excavations some of those "combustible things" were found in a basement within a few yards of the bakery - 20 barrels of carbonised tar that must have gone up like a bomb. Though people tend to think the fire destroyed everything in its path (including 89 churches) it also created its own time capsules.

Throughout the city, debris from the fire formed a layer that sealed in medieval cellars and their contents and it's only in the last few decades that some of these have been discovered (one, for example, being under what is now the New Look store in Gracechurch Street). Many of the retrieved objects - burned bricks, singed floor tiles, iron padlocks, the stems of goblets, clumps of hooks-and-eyes that have melted together - feature in the exhibition, forming a powerful testament to the effects of the blaze.

Strictly speaking, it was never a single blaze but a Hydra, licking through the old lanes in all directions. On our walk, Jeater and I followed the progress of one of the fire-waves as it rolled north and east. The City was rebuilt post-fire, brick and stone replacing timber, but the medieval street pattern is still in place. The warren of lanes between Lombard Street and Cornhill are especially redolent of the pre-Great Fire days.

London's first coffee shop was tucked in here and the diarist Samuel Pepys - whose vivid eyewitness accounts of the fire (the panicking pigeons, the singed cat) form a leitmotif of the exhibition - records visiting it in 1660. Six years later the café was burned out as flames surged up into Cornhill and engulfed the Royal Exchange.

By Tuesday the flames had spread along Fleet Street to Temple. At 8 o'clock in the evening fire broke out on the roof of St Paul's Cathedral, which was covered in wooden scaffolding, and the roof collapsed into the cathedral. Down among the monuments the alabaster tomb and effigy of one William Hewett, merchant, was badly damaged by the flames. What remains, his charred head and shoulders, is on display in the exhibition along with carved stonework from old St Paul's.

Meriel Jeater and I finished our walk near the Museum of London. Here, London Wall, a postwar freeway, crosses the site of the church of St Olave and in a small park to the south an ancient, weathered stone tablet, bearing a skull and crossbones, records that St Olave's was "destroyed by the dreadful fire in the year 1666". It was one of the last churches to burn.

"Around midnight on Tuesday the wind dies down and on Wednesday people get to grips with the fire," said Jeater. "By dawn on Thursday it's smouldering. Then you're left with this ruined city full of thieves and cut-throats."

Thieves and cut-throats in the City of London? Perish the thought.

Essentials

The Museum of London (020 7001 9844; museumoflondon.org.uk) at 150 London Wall is open daily, 10am-6pm. Fire! Fire! runs until April 17 2017: admission, adults £8, children £4. The museum offers a 45-minute talk for groups by the curator of the exhibition (£10pp), a Great Fire walking tour of the city (90 mins to two hours at £20pp), as well as shorter walks for families and storytelling sessions during summer school holidays.

best hotels in london

The City, London, England

8 Telegraph expert rating

A deft renovation of the muscular, 1920s former Port of London Authority headquarters, dominating... Read expert review

The City, London, England

7 Telegraph expert rating

Former Midland Bank turned millennial members club with check-in queues longer than Natwest at lu... Read expert review

The City, London, England

8 Telegraph expert rating

Feel like a true Londoner at this ultra-smart steel and glass apartment building with spectacular... Read expert review

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Great Fire of London remembered 350 years on

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The man responsible for English history's most famous conflagration was sitting on a concrete wall and holding up two burnt pies. He wore a baker's white hat and had soot smudges on his cheeks. "Higher," said the photographer, and Thomas Farriner - for it was he - lifted his pies to London skies.

# data[].attributes.headline
Lesson 2 - What was London like before the fire?

# data[].attributes.subject
Lesson 2 - What was London like before the fire?

# data[].attributes.body
The children will be presented with a range of resources to help them answer the above question about London life before the Great Fire.

Resource 1 - The children will look at this Hearth tax document from all the residents in Pudding Lane to help answer the question: What jobs did the people of London have in 1666?
The children can also attempt to read and understand the document answering questions such as why would this be a useful document to examine after the Great Fire?, as well as looking for Thomas Farynor's name on the document.

# data[].attributes.body
This story demonstrates what happens during the Great Fire. Each chapter focuses on different aspects, for example the old city of London, fighting the fire and rebuilding the city. After reading this the children can answer the following questions:
1. Who are the main characters in the story?
2. Why are the following characters important in the story:
i) Samuel Pepys
ii) Thomas Farynor
iii) King Charles II
iv) John Evelyn
v) Christopher Wren

From this, as a whole class, with assistance from the teacher, the children would sequence the events of the 4 days in chronological order to reinforce the events that took place. From this, the children would then create a story board of either 6, 8 or 10 boxes depending on ability, to show the events of the Great Fire.

# data[].attributes.headline
Lesson 1 - An introduction to the Great Fire of London.

# data[].attributes.subject
Lesson 1 - An introduction to the Great Fire of London.

# data[].attributes.body
The children will be given a brief introduction into what happened during the Great Fire of London, through a video and a story.

Resource 1 - The children watch this video which explains what happened during the Great Fire of London. The children work in talk partners with a whiteboard and must answer the following questions:
1. Where did the fire start?
2. How did the fire start?
3. How long did it last for?
4. What was life like in London in 1666?
5. Why did the fire spread so quickly?

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
It's been 350 years since the Great Fire of London started.

It was a four day blaze, which swept through Britain's capital, destroying large parts of it.

To mark the anniversary, a model replica of London will be burned, and new stamps have been designed.

But what exactly happened and how did it change the city's history?

Jenny has been taking a look back.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
What was the Great Fire of London? - CBBC Newsround

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
It's been 350 years since the Great Fire of London started. It was a four day blaze, which swept through Britain's capital, destroying large parts of it. To mark the anniversary, a model replica of London will be burned, and new stamps have been designed.