As part of their new NICER challenge ‘Super Sudz – The Return’, Year 6 children are learning about all things Victorian! To enhance their research and knowledge, a trip was arranged for them to attend The Black Country Living Museum in Dudley. While at the museum the children had the opportunity to find out, first hand, about what life was like in the Victorian era.
Our children learned about focal Black Country people who were themselves children living in the Victorian age and who survived to share their stories with local historians. They visited their homes and compared rich and poor living conditions, they visited shops and places of work and they took part in a Victorian school experience. They looked at how Victorian schools differed to the schools of today and what was it like at school in the Black Country in the 19th century.
The class room experience included a role play session to experience the strict discipline of the classroom, with a taster of the 3 R’s: reading, writing and arithmetic and learning by rote. The children wrote on slate boards with a slate pen and were shown how to write as children did using ‘hooks and hangers’. They were also shown the cane, which was used for badly behaved children and they were separated into rows of boys and girls as they would have been in Victorian times. It was a very interesting day and the children learned a lot about life in the past.
