Did the Romans have the best toilets in history?
Inspired by Michael Riley, this simple but hugely effective big ‘through time overview’ allows your students to gain a big picture of the past using the smelly vehicle of toilets.
Is he right to believe this view? Best to ‘Google’ it right?
Not only does this lesson explore the fact that students shouldn’t take the first answer they get from a search engine. It also helps them place toilets in time periods (Neolithic, Roman Medieval, Tudor and Victorian), and on a living graph.
Furthermore, it challenges a Whig interpretation of history as the history of progress in a highly accessible way.
You could easily develop this overview and spend more time on each of the following time periods to allow it to become a bigger development study.
Download lesson
- Lesson presentation: PowerPoint
- Lesson write-up: PDF
- Resource 1: Overview Sheet
- Worksheet 1: Graph annotation Sheet
