10 Ways to Get Your Kids Hooked on History
And 110 places to take them once they're hooked.
By: Johnny D. Boggs 06/01/2009
10. MAD ABOUT MOVIES
Wofford College’s Ted Monroe and Jeremy Jones used film and fiction in an interim course in January to teach the American West to college kids in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
“I try to show them that the literature and films of the West speak to the heart of the society we live in, and that they offer us an understanding of the past, a roadmap to the future,” Jones says, “and most of all an understanding of ourselves right now.”
Even Hopalong Cassidy has his admirers. Eight-year-old Jesse Cain of Fayetteville, North Carolina, has been hooked on Hoppy since he was four.
“I had such a good childhood, and I wanted [my children] to know a little bit about how I grew up,” says Jesse’s mother Christi, a preschool teacher. “We just teach him the old ways. You can’t tell Jesse that Hopalong’s not real, like Doc Holliday and that crowd. He understands all that, knows he was an actor, but he believes in his mind that Hoppy was real.”
Why not Gene Autry or Roy Rogers? “I asked him,” Christi says, “and he said, ‘Mama, I like them all right. But, Mama, it just don’t seem like they’re getting anything done with all that singing they do.”
Movies have often turned youngsters on to history. It’s as easy as 2+2=4, Monroe says (he is, after all, a math professor).
Screen Gems: An American Tail: Fievel Goes West (1991); Davy Crockett and the River Pirates (1956); True Grit (1969).
Comments (2)
Don't forget route 66, The Santa Fe Trail, The Mormon Trail and the Oregon Trail, I'd ask how they would have like some of those old walks?
New Mexico has history from one end to the other. Zuni and the other living Pueblos, the Pueblo Museum in Albuquerque. Man if you can't find something to excite the kids your not a very good salesperson!
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