If you take a look at our learning intentions (achievement standards) for this term, you’ll see that the very first sentence asks you to be able to key events, and the actions of individuals and groups…so probably going to help to understand what a key event is hey!

For your lovely budding brains, a key event is as follows;

“A thing that happens or takes place, especially one of such importance that it effectuates change on an individual, social, national or even international scale”…yeah, woh, big stuff hey.

But what does this mean in practice…with such a long history and so many differing perspectives, key events could be everywhere. Let’s use YouTube…

Geeze thanks Joe for those three videos…so what you’re saying is there are a massive amount of key events in history….Yep, you bet! The important part to this is defining the perspective of the participant in events and what happened to the participants afterwards. SO, what’s a participant?

Participant – an individual, group, collective, country, nation etc…that took part in an event, whether or not they actively chose to or not. Eg: The European nations were participants in World War One.

Perspective – the viewpoints and beliefs of participants in events. What did they think? What did they believe? Why did they believe this? This will give us an informed view of why events occurred and why the participants undertook the actions they did.

Task for growing understanding:

Pick a historic event that floats your boat, fuels your fire…etc..Unpack who the participants were and what there perspectives may have been at the time and why.

Achievement Standard: Students refer to key events and the actions of individuals and groups