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St Mary's Catholic
Primary School

Learning and loving on our journey with Jesus

Victorian Schoolroom and Reading Museum trip

In our History lessons this term we are learning about what schools were like in the past. In our first few lessons we asked many questions and correctly ordered four photographs of schools onto a timeline. We learnt that schools in the Victorian era are now beyond living memory so we need to rely on different sources to develop an initial understanding of how they were different to our classrooms today.

 

To make our learning come alive, we visited Reading Museum and a Victorian schoolroom. We were amazed by the school room, the stairs to get up there were so steep and there were so many things to look it. We are all able to identify at least three features of a classroom now and a classroom 100 years ago, identifying some similarities and differences. 

 

After dressing up in some Victorian school clothes, we were put in height order and transported back in time to become Victorian school children. We were not allowed to talk to each other and could only speak if spoken to by the teacher. We were not allowed to touch anything until told to do so and even had to sit with our hands behind our backs! We learnt how to write numbers on a slate, how to write letters with a pen dipped in ink and practised our reading.

 

We were also told about how children were punished in Victorian times and heard the swishing noise a cane would have made as it moved through the air. We even learnt about the special hat put on children who did not listen or were not learning well. It was called a dunce hat. 
 

We had such an amazing day and we are certainly able to say which time period we would prefer to go to school in and why. We are very thankful that schools today are not as strict about talking as they were in the Victorian times because we had so much to talk about on the journey back to school! 

 

(Don’t worry about our glum faces in the schoolroom, we were excellent at being in character!)

St Mary's Catholic
Primary School

Contact Us

Cookham Road, Maidenhead
Berkshire, SL6 7EG

01628 622570

office@stmarys-maidenhead.org.uk