Creating a Victorian shop in the classroom for role play
Role play can play an important part in giving young children an
understanding of the past. The site contains some downloadable material which
the children can use to create a Victorian shop in their 'Home corner'. These
materials include:
- An A4 poster of a Victorian advertisement for Sainsbury's tea
- An outline copy of the Dolphin wall tile
- An outline copy of the Chrysanthemum border tile
- Outline labels for Pear and Pineapple tins
- Label and top for Apricot jam
- An exploded net of a Red Label tea packet
If you look in the first photograph you will see how children from Valerie
Mason's Year 1 class at Fossdene School in Charlton, south east London, have
used these materials to create their own shop.
Reading the photograph from left to right:
- The first child is holding a tin of pineapples. Each child brought in an empty
washed baked bean tin (or similar) and completed their own Victorian label
from the set of downloadable resources.
- The next is holding a reconstructed net of a Red Label tea packet (again
downloaded from the site), but in this case the label is white because the
packet is red!
- The third child has a jar of apricot jam, using an old peanut butter jar.
- And the fourth is acting as the customer.
Behind the children are two versions of the A4 poster of a Victorian
advertisement for Sainsbury's tea, blown up to A3 on a photocopier. Each is
edged by 10 copies of the chrysanthemum border tile, photocopied onto pale
yellow paper to save on colouring-in time.
If you leave a border of 1 cm around the tea poster then the 10 chrysanthemum
border tiles will fit perfectly.
Every child in the class completed a border
tile, taking about 20 minutes. The attempt here is to re-create the wall
displays in the Victorian store which are just visible in this picture.
Above the bordered tea poster are the children's efforts at completing the
dolphin wall tile, using their own choice of colours. This is quite a difficult
and sometimes time-consuming job so you might want to restrict the number of
children who do this.
The shop uniforms
The attempt here was to produce something similar to Mr Newport's uniform, using
old school shirts from boys in the juniors and aprons made from an old white
tablecloth.
Wrapping the goods
The second photograph shows some of the children wrapping pretend slabs of
butter using greaseproof and other paper, cut to just larger than A4. You could
stick with A4 if you reduced the size of your 'pretend' butter. The children got
a great deal of fun out of doing this activity as well as practical experience
in area and volume.
The third photo shows some children completing their parcels.
The Victorian shop in the home corner has proved to be a very popular and
successful example of role play supporting the children's understanding of the
past, aided perhaps by the fact that they contributed extensively to the design
and content of the corner.
The fourth photo shows some more of the class role-playing in the shop.