Video transcript

Hello my name is Gaye and I'd like to show you some student work dating back from the 1890s to the very early 1900s. This work is primary school student work completed in their exercise books.

We find that most students had just the one book in which they recorded most of their lessons. Here we have sums and English in the same book on the two pages I'm showing you.

Often students first completed their work on a slate board using a slate pencil and then copied it into their exercise book using pen and ink.

The exercise books in our collection show us the sorts of lessons that children were doing at school at the time.

Harold's book is particularly interesting to us. It’s full of spelling tests and tables tests. Students had to do a dictation test from 8 lines read from their reading book. What we find interesting in Harold's book is right at the beginning of the book he's not able to keep up and he's missed lots of words but by the end of the book has become much more capable and he's caught nearly every single word that the teacher has read out loud in the dictation test.

We find all of the exercise books in our collection to be beautifully presented but we do wonder if they are a true representation of student work at the time or, as today, they will particularly neat, they were kept and treasured and then passed through many generations.

End of transcript.