Children in Victorian Britain - The Complete Series (7 lessons)

These teaching resources provide everything you need to teach this fascinating module, including lesson plans, slides, activity ideas, differentiated worksheets, an End of Unit Quiz and much more. Why not give them a try and see how easy and engaging your History teaching can be!

This first lesson provides your class with a background to the Victorians, giving details about Queen Victoria, her reign and some of the characteristic features of the period. It also lets your class think about what they already know about Victorian children and what they would like to find out, using pictures as a stimulus for generating questions and inferring facts.

This thought-provoking lesson looks at the lives of poor children in Victorian Britain and looks at what they had to do in order to avoid the dreaded workhouse. Starting with an extract from ‘Oliver Twist’, your class will then find out why children didn’t have to go to school, and how and why poor children were put to work as soon as they were able. They will also find out about some of the different jobs that children had to do and some of the associated dangers.

The Victorian era was a time of great social change. This lesson takes a look at the lack of protection for poor children in the early Victorian period and goes on to explore how and why laws were put in place to try and protect children from hazardous jobs and give them an education. Your class will learn about the work of Lord Shaftesbury and Dr Barnado, as well as some of the Acts that were passed in parliament in the nineteenth century. The alternative activity for this lesson provides an opportunity for an interesting class debate about these new laws to protect children.

This fun and informative lesson will have them marvelling at how different schools today are to schools during the Victorian era. The slides for this lesson start by showing them a photo of a typical Victorian classroom and challenging them to spot similarities and differences, before finding out a bit more about how Victorian schools were structured and what children were taught. There is then the opportunity to have a little taster of a Victorian classroom for themselves!

This lesson teaches your class why the Victorian era is often referred to as ‘the birth of childhood’. They will think about how leisure time for children might have been different in the Victorian period to today and learn about some of the ways in which children used to entertain themselves, including Victorian games and toys.

Your class can put their research skills to the test in this lesson as they carry out their own research to find out what everyday life was like for children in Victorian Britain. They will start by considering what they already know and making predictions for what they might find out for areas such as food, clothing, homes and religion. They are then challenged to use a variety of different sources of information to help them gain a clearer understanding of what daily life was like during this period.

Now that your class know lots of facts about life for children in Victorian Britain, they can now consolidate what they have found out. The slides pose some questions to discuss, such as what they think the best and worst part of being a child in Victorian Britain was. They can then go on to discuss a variety of questions in small groups. Meanwhile, the alternative activity provides an opportunity for children to express their understanding of the Victorian era through a range of engaging activities.