Learning activities

Starter activities

• Class discussion - When do you have your photograph taken? When are you likely to pose for formal shots, and when will they be informal? Who usually takes the photographs - members of your family and friends, professional photographers who have to be paid, newspaper photographers?
  
  
• Can we usually tell much about a person's home, job or financial situation from photographs of them?

Main activities

• Briefly introduce the subject of class structure in Victorian times, define working class, middle class, upper class (see Teachers' Notes). Discuss how the different social classes were considered very separate one from the other and could usually be recognised from their clothes and such like.
  
  
• Children to split into 4 groups, each group to study a pair of photographs: Sources 1 and 2 together, 3 and 4, 5 and 6, 7 and 8. Children to use the question sheets to note differences and similarities, and decide which of their 2 photos shows working-class and which shows middle class or upper class people.

Plenary activities

• Children speak briefly about their photographs while they are displayed on the whiteboard. They need to say whether their person or family is from the working class, or middle class or upper class, and explain how they know by referring back to the differences they have noted.
  
  
• Discuss what were the differences between the lives of the working class, and middle class or upper classes, from the evidence of these photographs.