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This Quiet Lady
and
The Sky Was
Blue
:
starting points for exploring family history, continuity, and concepts
of self and community. |
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In these two books, which share a web page here
Quiet Lady-Sky Was Blue,
Charlotte uses the medium of a little girl
looking at family photographs to discover where she fits into the family
and indeed, life itself. While
The
Sky Was Blue goes back several generations and explores "... important
things (which) will always be the same," This Quiet Lady
tracks a
more personal history. Perspicacious educators while find many trails worth traveling in either
or both of these books. Questions a class might explore include:
 If
you looked at pictures of your family, what stories would they tell?
Do
you believe that the "important things will always be the same," the
main idea in The
Sky Was Blue? Does that mean that what changes is unimportant?
The
little girl at the end of This
Quiet Lady says that her birth is where she begins; is that true? Where did
your father begin? Your mother? Their fathers and mothers? How far back can you
go? |
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Not just for the very young: using these books as a stepping stone to
developing researching and documentary skills |
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Everyone ---
whether they’re an adult, a middle-school aged kid, or yes, even a
sulky, hormonal adolescent --- loves being read aloud to. Perhaps we
have some deep shared human thread that dates back to being members of
primitive tribes, gathered around a campfire and telling stories, being
read out loud to is soul-satisfying, and both soothing and energizing.
Try reading either or both of these books aloud, even to older students,
and you will be amazed at how much more easily students approach and
develop the skills of doing research and documentary history. Suddenly,
it becomes self-evident; they are learning, at some level, to tell their
own stories, to locate themselves in time and place, and to find
meaning, continuity and strength in this location. And telling our
stories is a primal human need; in fact, one might almost say, it is
what makes us human. |
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Here are questions for the classroom, based on these books, to go
side-by-side with developing research skills. |
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Where does our
town or city begin? Where does our school begin?
When did my
family become part of this place? How? What brought them here? Why?
What stories are told in my family about beginnings? Who tells them? Do
I tell my stories, about who and where I am, and why, to anyone? Who?
(Friends? Younger brothers or sisters?)
What other ways besides photographs
do we have to explore what the lives of people here before us were
like? |
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Ideas for extended projects |
| The classroom
as living history museum:
Students might
bring in family photographs and tell stories about them, take snapshots
of each other and write captions for them, keep diaries, visit museum
exhibits, or look at old photographs of their communities. They might
create their own exhibit, in the classroom or public spaces of the
school, and tour younger students through, acting as docents or
curators. |
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Tying history and research to imagination in English or Creative
Writing:
After looking at long-ago, early photographs of unnamed people in the
community, have students
create
imagined life-stories of some of the people they find in those
photographs. They
might write give a particular figure a name and profession and write a
paragraph about him or her … and then do it from the first-person point
of view. Then, do a series of imagined post-cards from this person to
another person pictured in the photographs. |
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