A Great Christmas Inconvenience

Lesson at a glance

Suitable for: Key stage 2

Time period: Victorians 1850-1901

Curriculum topics: Recreation through time, Victorians

Suggested inquiry questions: What can we learn from the documents about how some Victorians celebrated Christmas?

Potential activities: Watch the video and complete the document tasks!

What can we learn from the documents about how some Victorians celebrated Christmas?

Welcome to a special episode of Time Travel TV for Christmas!

In today’s episode, you’ll learn about how Victorians celebrated at this time of year, whether they were rich or poor!


Tasks

 

We have made some changes to the format of Time Travel TV – the whole episode is now in one video so that it is much simpler to follow!

Watch the video and complete the document tasks! You can find all the images of documents on this page too, should you want to print them out for the activities!

You have 20 seconds to take a first look at the mystery document.

It isn’t a very long time! So think about the appearance of the document, what is the layout?

Additional documents to investigate

These documents are adverts from the Victorian and Edwardian periods.

  • What are the similarities and differences in how these two documents portray Christmas?
  • How do they compare to the Workhouse document?
  • Who do you think these documents are designed for?

Further activities

Browse the rest of our Christmas activities such as Craft Club, Tots storytelling and more document activities too!

Using the adverts as inspiration, design your own adverts for things you like to do at Christmas to persuade others to do the same. For example, this may be giving presents to friends and family, or baking a Christmas cake!



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Lesson at a glance

Suitable for: Key stage 2

Time period: Victorians 1850-1901

Curriculum topics: Recreation through time, Victorians

Suggested inquiry questions: What can we learn from the documents about how some Victorians celebrated Christmas?

Potential activities: Watch the video and complete the document tasks!

Related resources

Victorian Food and Drink

What do old adverts reveal?

Workhouse Voices

What did paupers say about the Poor Law?