Etch History Into Your Homeschool Day: Visit Your Local Cemetery
Posted on: 22 December 2014
Cemetery headstones are more than just grave markers. They can help springboard your homeschooler into historical discussions that you can't get confined within the walls of a conventional classroom. Start your journey into historical reflection by making a date to visit your local cemetery. Knowing that those people who are buried there lived in your hometown makes your visit more personal. It's a way for your homeschooler to connect with the past that the entire town shares.
Every Grave Has A Story
Arm yourself with a history book, some copy paper, pencils, charcoal, and crayons. Walk around. Find the oldest headstones. Or, allow your child lead you to find a headstone that sparks her imaginative fancy. Let your homeschooler create rubbings from the monuments. You can discuss them at the cemetery or take them home and research them. Design your field trip to work seamlessly into prior history lessons, or just let the day unfold spontaneously.
Discussions become hands-on history lessons when you find monuments with information like:
Mother Emmeline McGovern 1897-1918
Child Jakob McGovern 1918
Note that both died in 1918. What was going on at the time? World War I and the great "Spanish Influenza" pandemic were the main events in the United States (and the world) during 1918. It seems fair to surmise that the child lived only during the year or was stillborn. There weren't flu vaccinations at that time. Both may have died of influenza.
You could discuss what a stillborn birth is. You might follow up that stillborn births, or children dying within their first year of life, aren't as prevalent today as they were in 1918. Taking it further, you can discuss what's changed in the field of medicine since the first quarter of the 20th century. Maybe you might want to simply let your child's mind muse about what life might have been like for that mother and child.
The questions posed by one simple headstone can lead you to an entire afternoon of discussion--and maybe another field trip to a museum or hospital.
Learning The Value Of The Past
Cemeteries lend themselves to quiet reflection about the past. Find a bench under a tree, sit down, and chat with your child. You may find that these moments bond your child not only to the lessons of the past; but, that they etch an appreciation of cemetery history and art into their young souls. These moments where the past meets the present might also be some of your most memorable homeschooling memories.
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