Last year (maybe even as long as two years ago), we learned about England for our geography lessons, and during that, we covered a fun little bit of English history with Queen Victoria, and had an impromptu bit of history lessons and science lessons as the kids worked to design a bathing machine for Queen Victoria.
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Our activity inspiration: Queen Victoria’s Bathing Machine
Queen Victoria’s Bathing Machine follows a somewhat fictionalized account of how Queen Victoria really wanted to go swimming (bathing in the ocean) but was well aware it was not proper for the queen of England to be seen walking into the ocean, just like any common person. She expressed her desire to her husband, Prince Albert, and he got to work finding a way for Queen Victoria to go swimming.
This book is delightfully cute, and at the end, it has a couple of pages covering the inspiration for the story, and how we know so much about Queen Victoria’s reign (hint: she kept a lot of diaries).
Learning about Queen Victoria
Queen Victoria looms over history. We name an era of history for her, the Victorian era, because of how long she ruled. Her children and grandchildren ruled over Europe during World War 1 (If you look at a picture of a family reunion taken a few years before, you can see the cousins of the king of England, the ruler of Germany, and the Tsar of Russia all looking like brothers.). She herself did very little in terms of events that changed history, but she changed culture.
She is the reason brides wear white to a wedding now. Her family is the reason we have Christmas trees all across the United States and her empire. She established the idea of wearing black for mourning, and the idea of a formal mourning period, because of the depth of her mourning.
She defined the world for her time. All while not actively participating in the politics of the era. So if you’re teaching the events of the time period you will never actively teach about her. I was realizing as I looked at my lesson plans, I do not have a specific lesson about her, because she just looms in the background as a figure that is present, but never acting.
It fascinates me.
Instead, I’ll give you a video about her that was a fun little video I hunted down to figure out WHY I know about her in the vaguest sense, but no actual events for her.
Supplies for our bathing machine STEM activity
The kids were allowed to freely raid the recycling box, access to a hot glue gun, pipe cleaners, yarn, fabric, felt, basically the sorts of things you’d find in a good inventor’s box.
STEM activity: Design a machine to get Queen Victoria into the ocean without anyone seeing her in her bathing suit
If I had thought ahead, I would have stopped reading the book halfway through and just let the kids see what they could come up with. Unfortunately, I did not do that, so they got to see the final product.
Here’s Queen Victoria’s ACTUAL bathing machine. She could step into the one side fully dressed, and while she was in the one side she would change into her bathing suit, and from there she would step into the other side of this cubicle, and while she was changing a servant would move the wheeled cart into the ocean, and she could easily step out into the ocean water up to her waist already.
It’s quite an ingenious design, and became quite popular for other “women of quality” to do the same.
Princess’s design was most clearly influenced by the book. She had an elaborate setup with her stuffed animals all set to draw her room into the ocean.
The boys both went with their favorite plan to build something with Legos. Batman’s design was similar, but I don’t really have a good picture of it.
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