by Nancy McCammon-Hansen
Ok. I’ll admit it. I’m just a little bored. Thankfully our
cats are pretty good at entertaining themselves because if I had as many
children as I have cats…I’d be one crazy momma about now. So I’ve been scanning
the Internet for blog post ideas and came upon some great websites for parents
to spark an interest in history with their kids…and perhaps themselves.
Here goes with the suggestions:
Is this one ever a gold mine! Videos, activities, timelines
and, of course, a store. Beautifully done and very entertaining. May be one of
my new favorites.
While not graphically exciting as the first one, this
website does have activities for students that look interesting and will likely
keep them entertained for awhile. The National Museum of American History is
part of the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C.
You can also access http://historywired.si.edu from this
site. From the website:
“This
experimental site introduces visitors to some of the three million objects held
by the National Museum of American History, Behring Center.
With less than
five percent of our vast and diverse collection on public display in our
exhibit halls, we hope that Web sites like this will bring many more of our
treasures into public view. The initial 450 objects, selected by curators from
across the Museum, include famous, unusual, and everyday items with interesting
stories to tell. They are not intended to be representative of the Museum's
entire collection.
Design and navigation
for HistoryWired were generously provided by SmartMoney.com using its
Map of the Market technology.”
There is also a blog
with some interesting posts connecting the past to the present. Check it out at
http://blog.americanhistory.si.edu.
The website http://www.abookintime.com is designed to
assist teachers preparing lessons for various age groups and one particular
page that those of you who love reading will appreciate is http://www.abookintime.com/americanhistoryreadinglist.html.
Here you can find the names of books, by age and category, for various aspects
of history.
Since Fort Wayne and
Allen County have the second largest genealogy library in the nation, you may
want to study history via your family tree. Here’s a wonderful website:
which will allow you
to do just that. You can even research the meaning of your family’s surname. I
found that McCammon means:
“Scottish
and northern Irish (County Down): Anglicized form of Gaelic Mac Ámoinn ‘son of
Ámoinn’, a Gaelic form of the Norse personal name Amundr, which is composed of
the elements ag ‘awe’, ‘fear’, or ‘edge’, ‘point’ + mundr ‘protection’.”
Ancestry.com is the source the website leads you to.
Who knew there was a
website called www.kids.gov and that from
that site you can get to http://www.digitalvaults.org/.
Digital Vaults takes you to photos from the National Archives.
The site http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/index.php
provides webcasts on topics from the Library of Congress.
And as a parent or
teacher, you can get information right in your inbox by signing up for the
Kids.gov e-newsletter at http://kids.usa.gov/grown-ups/index.shtml.
Black History Month is
coming up in February and http://www.education.com/worksheets/black-history-month/
has a variety of worksheets that can be printed and given to your child to
learn more about this facet of our history.
There is also a page
devoted to Hispanic Americans http://www.education.com/worksheets/hispanic/.
You can use the pull
down menus to refine your search for other topics in American History.
This is just the tip
of the iceberg (and today in Fort Wayne that word has taken on even more
meaning since it’s -13 degrees outside and my feet are still cold with three
pairs of socks on) so search for History Activities for Kids and let us know
other fun sites that you find.
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