The site supports the National Curriculum Programme of Study for History at Key Stages 2 and 3. It also aims to extend children's historical understanding and skills beyond the scope offered by individual topics of study.

By promoting learning within cross cultural themes, the Umbrella aims to provide content and activities that challenge children and enable them to make connections between different areas of study of the past.

By including content familiar from National Curriculum topics, both at Key Stage 2 and 3, the Umbrella aims to provide familiar starting points for cross cultural study. Children are then able to study cross cultural themes at varying levels of difficulty: to challenge Key Stage 2 pupils, they might include content from the Key Stage 3 curriculum, such as Mughal India, in their cross cultural study. For less able pupils, their cross cultural study can be kept to comparison of content from the Key Stage 2 topics of study, for example Egypt and Mesopotamia. To challenge pupils from both key stages, their cross cultural studies can include content on a number of less familiar civilizations, such as the Mixtec, Great Zimbabwe and the Minoans.

The key goals of this site can be summarized as follows: the student's understanding of ancient civilizations is broadened; their ability to understand particular civilizations within a themed context is greatly increased and most importantly, their ability to make their own connections between societies of the past is stimulated.

There are three further goals of this web site. The first is to provide an educationally sound online resource that can be used independently by pupils within a school setting. The second is to provide teachers with an online resource that is user friendly and combines suggested classroom activities and online activities with background support and information. The third is to present information about Ancient Civilizations through the use of objects from the British Museum's collection.

We will address these goals by three main courses of action:

• Designing activities or modules that can be explored with varying degrees of independence and depth within about fifteen minutes.
• Providing suitable materials, (i.e.: technical and content support as well as suggested activities) for teachers to help in planning classroom lessons involving the web site.
• Supplying teachers with a range of activities that are geared towards pupils with different learning styles and abilities.

The aim of this site is not to be a definitive source of information about all aspects and all time periods of those civilizations that are represented. Rather, it is geared towards illuminating certain aspects of those civilizations through the thematic approach. It is expected that certain basic ideas and events relating to a particular civilization will be addressed by the classroom curriculum either before or after the pupil explores this product.