Family Friday
Stuck at home with your family? Great! These activities are designed to get families (and friends) talking, sharing, moving, exploring, and enjoying spending time together.
Don’t have family handy? Our virtual history community would love to step in. Feel free to use the comments on the Facebook post associated with each activity to ask questions and share triumphs (or failures!).
This program is recommended for adult and family audiences.
Preserving the Homesite
Week Eight: This Friday, we are taking you for a walk on the grounds of the 1774 Rock House to visit the barn, the old wagon road, and the steps of the Rock House.
Activity: May is preservation month so we are excited to highlight some great online resources to help you explore the historic landmarks in your own We encourage you to visit savingplaces.org, landmarkscommission.org, and www.nps.gov/subjects/nationalregister/index.htm to learn more about all these amazing places in #CLT and all these great moments in #CLTHistory.
Bonus Activity: Capturing COVID History
Our community is in unprecedented times and in 10, 20, or 30 years, our experiences will be part of history. Journaling or scrapbooking is a great way to remember what this experience was like while also being a good way to work through all the frustration and anxiety we’re all going through right now.
Here’s a worksheet with some prompts to get you started: Capturing COVID History:
Being “Graceful”
Children in colonial Charlotte may not have had a lot of free time, but they still knew how to have fun outside. For this Family Friday we encourage you to use materials around you to create your own toys.
Activity: Try your hand at being graceful and make your own colonial toy out of recycled materials.
Adventures from Home
It may seem like the world is out of reach at the moment, but you can go on an adventure right from your couch. We created a quarantine reading list of adventure-themed suggestions to get you started.
Activity: Pick any of the books on this list to read with family or a friend. Talk together, ask questions, discuss, and debate! Create your own book club or join us on our Facebook page to talk about these adventures, mysteries, and explorations. There’s nothing like a good book to bring people together.
Time For Good News
Like everyone else, we have been both amused and uplifted by John Krasinski’s latest addition to YouTube, but it got us thinking… what about good news in our own history?
Activity: For this week’s Family Friday Activity, we encourage you to take a look at Charlotte newspaper articles for this day (April 17th) the year you were born and find #somegoodnews to share with your friends, family, and us.
We’ve gotten things started by sharing this story from April 17, 1972’s Charlotte Observer, about the two giant pandas – Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing arriving from China on their way to their new home at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute. Why 1972? In 1972, the Hezekiah Alexander Foundation officially received designation as a 501(c)3 not-for-profit with the purpose of caring for Mecklenburg County’s oldest home – something we still do each and every day!
This image below is made available thanks to the Charlotte Mecklenburg Library and Newsbank. To access your own copies of historical newspapers including the Charlotte Observer and Charlotte Post, please visit the library website at cmlibrary.org.
