This post is a hodge podge of all things Victorian Related that we have studied over the past three months which don’t fit in well with any of my other 19th century posts. I have focussed much of our work on Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert: Resources
Books
The girls read the following book:
Charlotte, who reads like it is going out of fashion, also read the following books (which I did not require Thomas and Lillie to read, although Lil did read Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Charlotte still has to read Middlemarch). She read the following books over a period of two or three months, not just this week!:
Whilst Thomas read Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (actually Charlotte read this one as well!) and The Complete History of Jack the Ripper (which Charlotte can’t wait to read). Do you see a theme going here?:
Films
There are so many great films out there about Queen Victoria. These three films cover the majority of her life before Prince Albert, during her marriage to Prince Albert and finally after his death:
Over a period of about two months we watched the following films. These were an amazing and very visual way of learning about life in the Victorian era:
I recommend the Victorian farm in particular. Three historian experts go back in time and live as close as possible to a Victorian farmer for a whole year. There is so much Victorian goodness in each episode and well worth the expense of the dvds.
Reproduction Items
I also bought a couple of packs of reproduction items from the Victorian era. The first was all about Victorian entertainment:
And the second contained items pertaining to the Victorian household:
Many of the items in these packs were used to write articles for our Victorian Newspaper.
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert: Mini Unit Study
A nice addition to our studies was a short unit study on her (click on link to view whole unit):
We completed a lovely newspaper about her. The children wrote about Queen Victoria as a young lady; wrote about her roles as a mother, wife and queen; covered her marriage to Prince Albert; a biography of Prince Albert and her reaction to his death. We also covered The Great Exhibition, and the famous Brighton Aquarium:
Emily Dickinson Poetry Study
This was a fairly casual poet study. We used the above book daily during our morning meeting times; we used some wonderful homeschoolshare resources which included carrying out a study of the poem ‘Frigate’ which A8 copied out:
I read and then had them figure out some Emily Dickinson riddles (which was huge fun) from Teach Beside Me which Charlotte found surprisingly easy to guess. On some of them, I had the answer and couldn’t see how one got from the riddle to the answer, but Charlotte guessed some of them at the first line. Maybe it is the writer in her?
And lastly the children worked through the Emily Dickinson unit from HomeschoolCopywork:
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert: Victorian London
And of course we mustn’t forget all the Victorian buildings we saw and visited whilst we were up in London over the summer:
The Albert Memorial:
The Albert Hall:
The Victoria and Albert Museum:
Queen Victoria and Prince Albert: A Victorian Christmas
Charlotte’s project based learning was to organise a Victorian Christmas which we held on the 22nd December. You can read about it in my Very Victorian Christmas post:
A good all round study 🙂
Next week is all about Charles Dickens and the Victorian Poor.
Wow-what an amazing study! As always, you find the most wonderful resources. Looks like a great time was had by all!
Such wonderful resources!
I see lots of familiar resources in this post. I’d love to get the Victorian Farm Collection. It looks great. I have only found a Region 2 collection, but fortunately, we have a second player that plays Region 2 DVDs. Yay! Love your Victorian family picture. :))
There are a whole slew of the XX00 house shows to watch, and a bunch of them are on Youtube, I remember seeing the 1900 house when I was in college and being enthralled by it. I should go back and look for these again.
We found a highly amusing book called Queen Victoria’s Bathing Machine, all about her desire to try swimming.
There’s a new series on Queen Victoria that’s either from BBC or maybe Netflix….. I don’t remember, I just remember enjoying watching it.