Victorian Schools

This week’s weekly review was written by Scott, Xanthe, Alyssa, Hannah, Beth, Euan, Keziah, Sophie, Zayaan and Christopher.

This week in P5b has been very Victorian themed. We returned from music on Tuesday to find Mr Cross not his usual self. Instead he was very strict! We thought he was just in a grumpy mood but then we noticed the class had a blackboard at the front, the tables were in rows and Mr Cross was holding his metre stick. We then realised that Mr Cross was pretending to be a Victorian teacher. We had to stand behind our chairs in our rows with the boys and girls segregated with boys at the front and girls at the back. Mr Cross inspected our hands and clothes to ensure they were clean and then we began Victorian lessons.

We learned our times tables by chanting them together as Victorian’s believed this would help children remember their times tables. We also had to come out to the front to “the line” and spell words, read from a book and the blackboard. Mr Cross also enforced a very strict level of discipline. For example, Mr Cross would bash his stick on the table, he would remove pages out of jotters for sloppy work and send naughty children to the corner. We had very mixed opinions on the day, some us really enjoyed the intense learning that went on and some of us were really scared and hated it! This experience has made us reflect on how education today has changed so much since back in Victorian times. We are debating whether it has changed for better or worse!

Another thing that we have done this week is we have changed our Daily Mile. We have been competing with P5A to see who can get the most laps in 10 minutes. This week we were narrowly defeated by P5A by 3 laps! We shall run even harder next week!

Next week is another busy one for P5. We have the disco on Tuesday and a rugby festival on Friday. Thanks for reading