Today’s lesson is teaching your child to think like a historian.
Supplies:
Camera (cell phone, polaroid, or disposable)
Printed photos (from printer or developed)
A large open space on the floor
Your child will take pictures or have you take them throughout the day. You will print the photos and on a different day (at least two days later), shuffle the printed photos and ask your child to re-sequence them chronologically. They can explain their reasoning to you. They can then compare their sequence to the original sequence that lives in your phone or in the negatives.
If you use a Polaroid camera, keep a record of the order as they were taken to act as the “answer key” for when the child arranges the sequence a few days later.
Benefits
To think like a historian, your child must learn how to look at a record, sequence it chronologically, and use the clues of the images to help make those judgment calls. This is step one in historical research—finding the right timeline for how, when and why occurrences happen in the order they do.
Start with doing a single day, then try taking photos over the course of a week, and finally try doing a big project with the whole family taking pictures over the course of a month. The analysis gets more and more challenging the longer the time period—a great firsthand experience for how challenging it is to make historical record assessments from millennia ago!
I share more about this activity on pages 149-153 in The Brave Learner.
Share this post