The museums in DC are so inspiring. It makes me want to curate my own exhibit when I get home. I asked the kids if they wanted to make a small museum in our house and they said, Noooo! But I suspect if I just start on my own, they'll hop on board.
I can't decide if this will be a virtual museum or a real one. Maybe a little bit of both.
I have noticed a trend in some museums toward flash with minimal content. Not so here. The exhibits were sometimes flashy, but so deep as well.
They all start with a pithy title like:
If you can't make it to DC, try the book Written in Bone: Buried Lives of Jamestown and Colonial Maryland (Exceptional Social Studies Titles for Intermediate Grades)
It was especially interesting to us since we had just visited Jamestown.
When you read about The Starving Time at Jamestown and see the graves it tells the story the usual way.
But when you see, in Written in Bone, the piles of horse, dog, cat and rat bones the colonists butchered and ate, it tells the story in a more intimate way.
My favorite part of the exhibit was where they identified colonists' occupations just by examining the bones.
Tailor's notches: chipping of the teeth and characteristic grooves made from holding needles in the teeth identify the owner of this jaw as a tailor.
The Library of Congress is making a huge push to digitize its collection and make it available to the public. On their website you can sign up for myloc.gov and make your own collection of books and documents housed at the LoC.
The National Park Service is going multimedia, too. They have virtual tours. I liked the flipbook documenting the construction of the Lincoln Memorial.
If you get inspired to curate your own exhibit, please share it with us and put a link in the comments section.
8 comments:
Cute!
And how crazy that what she wants to read is "Animal Traps and Trapping"! That is one curious girl you have there. I'm looking forward to going to her for beekeeping advice.
Hey, I just noticed: did you switch from Blogspot to Blogger? Suddenly it's so easy to leave a comment!
My kids love those. What a good idea. Maybe I could buy some prime grading time with one. If I didn't count the prep time. . .
Ev was disappointed that the book was historical (the history of traps) rather than practical. She wants to be left in the wilderness to survive on her own, so she says she needs to learn to hunt and trap animals to eat. I am very curious about whether she would really do it.
Oh, and I got rid of word verification because a bug was preventing people from posting. We'll see what happens with the spam. So far, so good.
In the pursuit of buying time for myself I did a treasure for Clem and a friend that included codes (a simple alphabet shift of one letter, but I gave them no hints so they had to figure it out on their own).
You could also scramble the words in the clue, or use anagrams of important words that they have to unscramble.
Math riddles like this stretch out the hunt:
http://www.mathriddlebook.com/index.html
I just thought of another idea...make your clue and make list of words that start with the same letter as each word in the clue, in order. Make a word scramble where each word in the list goes across and each secret clue word goes down. As the find the words in the list they'll discover the clue words.
Oh, and this time I hid the clues better than I used to. They kept coming to me in despair, but I just sent them back out to look harder.
Oh, I used to do those with my older two. I think I shall plan one this week for the younger set. :)
I still have the words for another go at it! Loved seeing the BUGs on your Blog. First time trying since I was not able to before - Fingers Crossed!
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