For Schools: Teachers' Centre

This digital learning resource focuses upon Victorians, and provides learning material for schools to study life in Victorian Times. It is of particular relevance to the KS2 History National Curriculum, but also at KS1 and KS3.

Teachers' Notes

Objects: a host of ideas for using the on-line themes gallery

Newspapers: a suggested scheme of work for the newspaper simulation

NB The news simulation is a live simulation and available by special request only to

Education Officer, Tiverton Museum, 01884 256295, education@tivertonmuseum.org.uk

Knightshayes (National Trust): Victorian Walled Garden Scheme of Work

Schemes of Work

The Virtual Victorians has been designed to provide material to support the following QCA schemes of Work:

History

KS1:

1. How are our toys different from those in the past?

2. What were homes like a long time ago?

KS2:

11 What was it like for children living in Victorian Britain?

12 How did life change in our locality in Victorian times?

KS3:

11 Industrial changes : action and reaction


Literacy

KS1 & KS2:

The site in general promotes reading strategies for locating information, notetaking.

KS2:

The newspaper simulation can be used to support the literacy strategy in sentence level work and text level work and the journalistic writing is particularly relevant to the non fiction element of year 6, term 1. It provides an opportunity to write for a real purpose and a defined audience.

It provides experience in a range of literacy skills:

  • reading for detail
  • process writing (drafting, editing)
  • writing to defined space limits
  • research skills
  • interviewing
  • summarising response
  • writing quickly and accurately
UK National Curriculum Fit
KS2 History

Victorian Britain

11. Victorian Britain

  1. A study of the impact of significant individuals, events and changes in work and transport on the lives of men, women and children from different sections of society.

Knowledge and understanding of events, people and changes in the past

2. Pupils should be taught:

  1. about characteristic features of the periods and societies studied, including the ideas, beliefs, attitudes and experiences of men, women and children in the past
  2. about the social, cultural, religious and ethnic diversity of the societies studied, in Britain and the wider world
  3. to identify and describe reasons for, and results of, historical events, situations, and changes in the periods studied
  4. to describe and make links between the main events situations and changes within and across the different periods and societies studied.

Historical enquiry

4. Pupils should be taught:

  1. how to find out about the events, people and changes studied from an appropriate range of sources of information, including ICT-based sources [for example, documents, printed sources, CD-ROMS, databases, pictures and photographs, music, artefacts, historic buildings and visits to museums, galleries and sites]
  2. to ask and answer questions, and to select and record information relevant to the focus of the enquiry.


KS1

Historical enquiry

4. Pupils should be taught:

  1. how to find out about the past from a range of sources of information [for example, stories, eye-witness accounts, pictures and photographs, artefacts, historic buildings and visits to museums, galleries and sites, the use of ICT-based sources]
  2. to ask and answer questions about the past.


KS3 History

Britain 1750-1900

10. A study of how expansion of trade and colonisation, industrialisation and political changes affected the United Kingdom, including the local area.

2. Pupils should be taught:

  1. to describe and analyse the relationships between the characteristic features of the periods and societies studied including the experiences and range of ideas, beliefs and attitudes of men, women and children in the past
  2. about the social diversity of the societies studied, both in Britain and the wider world
  3. to analyse and explain the reasons for, and results of, the historical events, situations and changes in the periods studied
  4. to identify trends, both within and across different periods, and links between local, British, European and world history
  5. to consider the significance of the main events, people and changes studied.

Historical interpretation

3. Pupils should be taught:

  1. how and why historical events, people, situations and changes have been interpreted in different ways
  2. to evaluate interpretations.

Historical enquiry

4. Pupils should be taught to:

  1. identify, select and use a range of appropriate sources of information including oral accounts, documents, printed sources, the media, artefacts, pictures, photographs, music, museums, buildings and sites, and ICT-based sources as a basis for independent historical enquiries
  2. evaluate the sources used, select and record information relevant to the enquiry and reach conclusions.

Virtual Victorians is a partnership project between Tiverton and Mid Devon Museum Trust and The Telematics Centre, University of Exeter. Funded by the DfEE it extends and improves the learning resources of a small, successful Museum based education service by utilising new technologies. A number of Museum based education services are available to small rural schools through the Internet. There are opportunities to access the education handling collections through digital images of Tiverton Museum artefacts and access to objects not normally available for handling.


Ask a VictorianVictorian NewsTeachers' Centre