Roman City Life: The Domus (Roman Housing)

This lesson was designed for my pupils studying OCR Classical Civilisation 9-1 GCSE. It provides an excellent in-depth look at the Roman Domus / Villa - the household and home of wealthy Romans / Roman Patricians.

The lesson is dual coded and there is an emphasis in reducing excess ‘noise’ in the PowerPoint file - allowing pupils to easily access the content without distraction. There is also a yellow overlay on each slide to aid any pupils with irlens / dyslexia (this can easily be removed though by clicking on the overlay on each slide and pressing ‘delete’).

The lesson begins with a look at a map of Pompeii to allow pupils to see the prevalence of the Domus in a Roman city and then pupils are given a handout (included as a slide to be printed off) of a typical domus floor plan with a key and pupils must colour code both.

Once pupils thus have an understanding of the uses of the rooms in a typical domus and what they were called, there is a handout (again, included as a slide) to be printed off of extra info where pupils are encouraged to highlight key points and use to make extra notes to supplement their work up to this point.

There is then a short 3 minute video embedded in the next slide which summarises what pupils should have learnt up to this point.

Having established the key features of a typical domus, pupils are then presented with the floor plans of three important Roman villas in Herculaneum and Pompeii:

1. The House of the Wooden Partition
2. The House of Menander
3. The House of Octavius Quartio

Pupils are prompted to compare the floorplans and key features of these houses to their ‘typical’ domus floorplan and pick out similarities and differences.

A group task then ensues where pupils fill in their fact file sheets on each house using more detailed information included in the proceeding slides (designed to be printed out - but you can go through the info on the board, or alternatively read the information for each house aloud and ask students to make notes as you read - I did it slightly differently with my two groups).

Finally, the PowerPoint ends with OCR GCSE Classical Civilisation exam questions so pupils’ learning and understanding can be assessed.

Thanks for taking a look :-)