Teachable Moments and Free Resources in Family Photos

I recently spent an interesting afternoon with a 9 year old and a seven year old boy, members of our family. We were having a scorcher of a day and it just made sense to spend the hottest hours indoors out of the sun and heat. It turned out to be the perfect opportunity for those young guys to teach me what free educational resources are and where to find them.

The problem at the beginning was that the inside of my house is not even tolerably interesting to a couple of rough and tumble boys on a summer day. Their main ambition at my house is to spend as much time in the creek as they can, even in the winter, and get so filthy that their parents would like to force them to walk home rather than let them in the car.

I apologized for not having video games and refused the suggestion that they use my computer to game on line (I work on my computer! "Oh yeah," the seven year old said in a tone that suggested I had an affliction that the family has to tolerate, "She writes stuff.") The older boy said no problem we'll look at pictures and he grabbed several dusty photo albums from the bottom shelf of a bookcase and sat down on the sofa.

When the younger child joined him, I ran for my computer to finish some work in progress, absolutely sure that the photo albums would provide about ten minutes of distraction. And it was about ten minutes later when they showed up beside my desk with a small album of photos their great grandmother had taken in England years before and a dozen questions.

Before I knew it hours had passed. My work was left undone, but something much more important had occurred. The three of us had wandered together from Stonehenge and medieval Europe, to the Tower of London and the American Revolution with that one album. Then we got into the "really old pictures" and talked about the settling of Texas, the South in the Civil War and the North in the Civil War via photos we saw of soldiers in both uniforms. We went along on the westward migration and discoveries of gold and silver, and ended up with brief stops at WWI and WWII and the Great Depression. By that time we had my big dining room table covered with albums and, yes, shoe boxes of photos, along with maps, encyclopedias and dictionaries, and a couple of magnifying glasses.

The boys had just pulled out another "old album" when their grandfather showed up to pick them up. "What the heck is going on here?" he asked. Just then his eyes landed on the first page of the album the boys had just opened.

"We're looking at old stuff and dead people," the seven year old said.
"Like that guy," the older boy laid a dirty finger on the image of his grandfather at 19 years old, leaning proudly on the front fender of a yellow 1965 GTO. "Will you look at that weird car?"
"What do you mean weird?" Granddad is not too old to get down on the level of a nine year old.
"Well, it is ridiculous. It's like a triceratops."
"Geez, we got a picture of an antique car. Maybe I could take that to school the first day for sharing time."

World History, American History, Family History; we'd covered them all with the free resources lying dusty on a book shelf. And an added bonus for me was seeing their Granddad at a loss for words.

Copyright 2009 Creekside Education & Susie Williams

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