These activities and focuses for study are aimed at younger students.
Display an image of the object on the classroom whiteboard and ask the students to investigate the object by looking carefully and discussing the possible answers to these questions:
- What does the object look like?
- What is this object?
- How would it be used?
- Who is shown on the badge, what sort of person do they seem to be?
Make a classroom collection of badges produced for events or places. Create a classroom badge museum with labels for each badge.
Make a classroom collection of modern memorabilia for a local, national or international commemorative date or event. Ask the students to design additional objects which reflect the theme of the display which could be ‘sold’ in a classroom museum shop.
Design a badge or another souvenir such as a mug or a tea towel to celebrate an event, date or anniversary. This could be a modern one or you could use the events and people the students have been studying in history and create products for them.
Ask teachers to bring in photographs of themselves when they were younger. Can the students guess who is who? This activity can also be done with the students and they could create a then and now portrait similar to the one on the badge.
There is a wealth of original sources for Queen Victoria including prints, photographs, film and written sources.
Look at the images of Queen Victoria in A bigger picture and discuss how she changed during her life. Make a timeline of her life and find more images to add to it. How old do the students think Victoria is in the carving by a Yoruba artist? Which aspects of the queen has this artist chosen to emphasise?
Watch the film footage of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee procession in For the classroom. Ask the students to imagine that they are in the crowd watching the procession. Ask them to describe what they would see, hear and feel as a Victorian spectator. Alternatively, the students could create a news report describing what happened in the third person.
Look at the extracts from Queen Victoria’s diary in For the classroom. There are descriptions of her Golden and Diamond Jubilee festivities. Choose some sections to read to the class and ask the students to imagine they were Queen Victoria. What would they do for the day and what would they write in their diary?
The next three enquiries make use of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II in 2012.
Find out about the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II. Invite people in to school to talk about what they did on Jubilee Day. Students could interview people about their experiences as part of a living memory oral history project.
This oral history project could be extended with further interviews asking people about their memories of events such as Queen Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953 or the Silver Jubilee in 1977. Different classes could conduct interviews relating to different events in the life of Queen Elizabeth II and then report back to the others about what they found out.
Use the videos of Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden and Diamond Jubilees in For the classroom to compare with the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Aspects for comparison could be what the queen did on the day, how people celebrated or how people found out about the day’s events. This will bring out similarities such as the continued use of a royal coach for royal processions, marching soldiers, crowds of onlookers and differences such as news coverage by newspaper only and by newspapers, radios and television.
