When thinking about how to help your family connect to the history and culture of a destination don’t forget about the power of visuals.
Guidebooks from the library (DK has rich glossy images) or brief narrated videos like Smarthistory are great examples. Maps and simple timelines also provide context so you know what was happening before and after and in other places that relate to your trip to Rome, Shanghai, or Lima.
Useful Charts
One resource that we love are UsefulCharts. The company is run by Matt Baker, a Canadian educator whose work Dan was such a fan of he reached out and emailed him before purchasing one of each poster he sells. We have a handful of these hanging in the hallway leading to the kids bedroom but you don’t have to take it that far.
Instead, consider if any are relevant to you or the kids for an upcoming trip. He’s got timelines and European family tree, and, Dan’s favorites, Egyptian, Greek, and Norse mythology. His evolution and classification of life is also fantastic and might be of interest to any budding scientists in your home.
We’ve referenced the European family tree for almost every trip. It’s hard to remember everyone in that oddly shallow gene pool.
In preparation for Spain we regularly tracked Ferdinand-Isabella to Charles V (the Holy Roman Emperor) to King Philip IV who is in our library’s Katie and the Spanish Princess but also in Velázquez’s Las Meninas which was top of our art-to-see list that year.
For Paris and Italy trips we spent time with the European timeline to compare events from multiple nations. For anyone thinking of trip to Italy, think about how being familiar with the family tree of Roman Emperors could help your family better appreciate the antics of Caligula or Nero, see who built the Colosseum, or understand why Trajan’s market is worth visiting.
As recently as Dan’s Circe book we talked about how the characters father, Helios, and how he was related to others gods that also appear in the Odyssey. (Our 5 year old son is a big fan of the Trojan horse story and is now asking why it took Odysseus 10 years to get home. He’s worried we won’t have time to travel around Greece at that pace.)
The posters are quite robust though we laminated ours anyway in case some dry erase markers would be of use. If you don’t have space or budget for a poster, look online or consider asking some big kids to build one for the family. Come up with the theme (food, nature, art, history, music, etc.) and see what they can come up with. Little kids might just work with older family members to draw pictures on their own crayon/pencil/marker timelines.
Family discussion topic: What are some possible timelines or charts/diagrams related to destinations you’re interested in traveling to?
talk soon,
Dan
PS We have no affiliation with Useful Charts, financial or otherwise. Just big fans or his work and have seen the benefits to family travel firsthand.