Looking Back: Victorian Fashion - Age 8-13

The Looking Back: Victorian Fashion resource is an informative and interactive teaching tool for children aged 8-13. This pack is perfect for reinforcing key historical skills and helping children acquire important knowledge about how men and women’s fashion changed in the Victorian Period, for both the rich and poor.

Content:

This resource contains a total of 44 pages and covers the topics of: the changes in the shape and style of women’s clothes in each decade between 1840 and 1900; the working lives of dressmakers and seamstresses; how new inventions and technology changed fashion for men and women; aesthetic dress; the clothes worn by Victorian men; the second-hand clothes markets; and the rise of ready-made clothing.

In this pack, children will learn how to:

• engage with the past and get excited about history. This pack is rich in detail. Historical facts are presented in a fun and engaging manner, surrounded by colourful illustrations, making the information easy to remember and recall. Children will get to read fascinating imaginary interviews with real and fictional characters of the times, newspaper reports, magazine articles, and adverts; as well as look, at lots of original cartoons and illustrations. This pack includes lots of interesting firsthand source material.
• do research and find information. For some of the topics, children will have to find out the answers for themselves to specific set questions and look for pictures. In order to do this, they’ll need to investigate and retrieve the relevant information in books or on online websites. This will help them learn how to ask their own questions and think about what they want to know.
• explain, or interpret, evidence and information. Many of the set questions and creative writing exercises will encourage children to thoughtfully consider the evidence before them. They will be asked to look for clues in texts and pictures, to describe, to explain, to reason, to draw conclusions, to think critically and form their own opinions.
• communicate historical information in an exciting way. This pack includes lots of different sorts of activities: from answering questions and writing diary entries, to dressing up a male and female figure with the typical garments worn by men and women in the 1860s. These fun tasks will help children learn how to write their own narratives about each topic; how to recall, select and organise relevant historical knowledge; how to empathise and imagine how people from the past might feel and act; and how to present their ideas in a manner that is memorable and appeals to the intended reader.

This pack is designed to help support your children as they explore the Victorian era, deepen their understanding of this historical time period, and ignite their interest in history. However, many of the tasks would also make wonderful themed creative writing activites for english lessons and it also contains lots of information that would be ideal