Activities
Our suite of activities provides a wide range of tried-and-tested ideas for exploring the themes, people, events and ideas of the Age of Revolution in the classroom.
Each one is linked to our Revolutionary collection of objects, artworks, literature, archive materials and songs from museums ad galleries across the UK. From talking dentures and historical ‘snap’, to Revolutionary memes, Twitter campaigns and Mystery objects, our tried and tested activities help bring the past to life and connect it to students’ lives today.
Use our activities with your students, adapt them, or delve into the collection and create your own. Our guides for teachers provide more useful hints and tips for making the most of these intriguing and fascinating representations of the past. For more in-depth ideas for using the collection, try our enquiries and Creative challenges.
All of our learning resources were authored by education specialists and historians.
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Introducing the Age of Revolution
A simple guide to introducing the Age of Revolution to your students and linking some of the extraordinary people, ideas and events to their own lives today
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Age of Revolution Top Trumps
Ideas and activities for using our FREE Age of Revolution Top Trumps in the Classroom
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How to make a revolutionary stop-motion animation
A simple, step-by-step guide to creating animations with your students
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Label mix up
Student use their enquiry skills to match the label to the correct image, and identify how the object, person, event or idea impacts their lives today.
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Fascinating facts
Did you know the first known flight to carry people took place nearly 250 years ago, in Paris, in a balloon? Discovering and presenting fascinating facts about the Age of Revolution.
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Green screening
Students use a simple green screen app to transport themselves back in time to a revolutionary event.
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Image of the day
Stimulate students’ curiosity and hone their skills of deduction.
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Jigsaws
Cut up a revolutionary object or image and mix it up. Can you put it back together?
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Looking closely at images
How many details can students see – and remember? What do they tell us about the past?
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Mystery objects
What were these revolutionary objects really used for? Classroom games to test students’ powers of deduction – and trickery!
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Objects personified!
Using historical objects to fire imaginations…what if it could hear, smell, talk? What might it get up to in its spare time? What secrets might it tell us?
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Revolutionary memes
Use a simple app to put a modern-day twist on a historical object or image.
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Talking about a revolution
Use a simple app to make an object or artwork speak - what might they have to say about their owner or maker, where they’ve been, what they’ve seen…?
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True or false?
Revolutionary facts and figures - can students fool their classmates?
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Twitter campaigns
How might the Chartists or the Abolitionists have used Twitter in their campaigns for political and social revolution?
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If only they could talk
What might the Waterloo teeth have to say? What questions might they ask the students..?
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Reliable evidence?
How reliable are primary sources? Does their meaning change if we know why they were made? What if an artist never even saw the subject they painted..?
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Transport pairs
Getting to know how trains, boats, bikes and planes have changed since the Age of Revolution.
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Who am I?
A historical twist on the popular game.