As part of their Victorian Topic in history Prep 5 visited Quarry Bank Mill to complement their learning on the lives of working Victorian Children. During the day the children visited the Apprentice House where they learned that Victorian children would start work at 6am. The guardian of the house would visit them in the mill and literally give them a handful of lumpy porridge at 8am. The children would receive the same for lunch but with some vegetables mixed in before working until 9pm when they would return to the apprentice house when the boys would learn mathematics and how to read and write. The girls were not given an education, they in turn would learn how to cook and sew. The children did this six days a week, every week. On Sunday they walked two miles to church, no matter the weather, and two miles back where they would then receive three hours of religious education.
The children learned about the dangers faced by Victorian children in the mill; they could be “De-gloved” by the carding machine, crushed by the “Spinning Mule”, go deaf from the constant noise of the machines or inhale so much cotton dust their lungs would fail. The children also took part in a workshop where they learned how to card wool by hand before spinning it into thread as it was done in the cottage industries before the Industrial Revolution.
The day out was a fantastic learning opportunity for the children which showed them how children their age lived during the Victorian era.