We spent an hour being Victorian School children! We dressed up, set our classroom up as a Victorian Classroom and used a slate to write on. We went through the rules of a Victorian School and Mrs Noden was very strict in her role as a Miss!

We looked at photos of Hodnet School in the past (when Mrs Noden was a little girl). The children compared photos from now and photos from Mrs Noden’s time at Hodnet School. The children noticed lots of similarities and lots of differences, such as black boards and no interactive white boards and children wearing no school uniform.

This week we have been thinking about how our homes might have looked in the past and the things we would have had in them. We had a box of items from the museum and sorted them into items from the past and items from now. We talked about the differences in terms of materials, electricity etc. We also sorted our home corner and put all the items that are from now into a box and enjoyed dressing up. Children looked the items in the discovery box and tried to guess what they would have been for and at the end of the day the items were revealed. This work was linked to our story reading Peepo and we enjoyed cleaning brass with braso and examining the pictures in the story. We looked at pictures of kitchens in the past and bathrooms in the past and spoke about how they are different to our bathrooms now.

We looked at Victorian style portraits and recreated them, we remembered that we could not smile and that people in them wanted to wear their best clothes and show how much money they had!