I always tell children when they’re researching a subject, I say don’t start with the dates if you’re doing Churchill and just start with like did he have pets as a kid? You know what did he like to eat? And I say and then go online and find menus from the time that he was around and find out what a steak and kidney pie cost.
I say start with the detail, the small little details, the everyday details of a person’s life. What were the fashion, World War I, don’t start with Archduke Ferdinand because I could never understand it’s like Archduke Ferdinand, World War I, start with what was the music of the time? What were the popular foods? You know if people were in Chicago, what were the ethnic groups in Chicago? Start with the things that you can relate to, that you would want to know about a person.
Another exercise I do with children sprang from my book Maritcha: A Nineteenth Century American girl. Which is based on the memoir she left behind and her families archives that are at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. And I tell children I say I was able to do this book because her family, well they were upper middle class, they were able to leave behind artifacts from their lives.
And I said do you realize, say if I’m in the Bronx where I live, I’ll say in a hundred years a writer is going to want to write a book about kids in the Bronx in the 21st century and they’re going to go archives and libraries to look for material and I say what are you going to leave behind? So that you and your block and your people will be in the history books? I say history is made up of what people leave behind so when I have the time I’ve done extended exercise, I have them, as I said get a shoebox or some container.
And put in the things that are really important to you that you’re going to leave behind. And I find it is amazing what children come in with. And they’re very serious and they’re very caring and I’ve even done it with kids where the teacher says they’re rough, they’re tough. But one will say this was the bracelet my best friend in first grade gave me. Or this is a photograph of myself and my siblings before we went into foster care.
And they start, and I say and this matters, this tells a story. And you can even do it without having them bring it in, you can do it and say on a board what are you going to leave behind? And they’ll say and I’ll say, how will we know if you traveled? Maybe a map, pinpointing all the places you went. How will we know your favorite foods, and they’ll say “a menu?” And I say how will we know how to pronounce your name, we’ll leave a recording, “my name is so and so.”
How will we know about your every day, “I’ll leave behind my journal, my diary.” And I think that exercise encourages some kids I think to keep diaries and journals and to keep artifacts from their lives. And what it does more than anything else it tells them that they matter.