Category: Maps

#MyColorfulAncestry for Kids

3/30/2016

A week or so ago, a genealogist by the name of J. Paul Hawthorne posted an image of five generations of his ancestry, which was color-coded by birthplace. Well, his idea (and his Excel template) went viral, and genealogists have been creating their own colorful ancestry charts and posting them on social media. (Read more about it and download the free template on J. Paul Hawthorne's blog, GeneaSpy.)

Instead of making one for my own ancestry, I decided to go one generation forward and make one for my kids. And instead of limiting it to five generations, I completed the chart until I reached the 'immigrant' generation of each line. As you can see, my kids' Ohio roots run deep, but they also claim ancestors from seven separate present-day European countries. In other words, this is a great opportunity to use their ancestry to teach them some European geography.

My daughter loves to color, so she used colored pencils to fill in the states and countries listed on the chart onto blank, black-and-white political maps. There are lots of free, printable map resources out there on the Internet, but my favorite one is the Maps section of SuperColoring.com.

The color I used for each location on the chart is the same color my daughter used to color that location with. Visually, I think it helps her connect the chart more with the map than if we had used different colors. Feel free to talk about the locations and the individual ancestors as much or as little as your child will tolerate. Perhaps hang the colorful maps in their room or playroom as a reminder of where they come from. :-)

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Ancestor Geography Circles

2/9/2015

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If you are an elementary educator, you've likely seen versions of this particular activity on educational blogs or Pinterest. It's a visual, hands-on way of teaching young children about geographic scale using a series of circles that increase in size as each geographic feature increases in size. My seven-year-old son brought one home from school the other day, so I thought about doing this at home, not only as a way to learn about geographic scale, but also as a way for my kids to learn about where some of their ancestors lived.

Ancestor Geography Circles

First, you need to cut out differently-sized circles on construction paper or scrapbook paper. I used my set of kitchen pots, along with some smaller bowls and cups, to trace circles on the paper. Before making ancestor sets, I highly recommend making a circle set that is applicable to your child. This way, they will be able to compare and contrast their set with their ancestor sets.

You must choose the geographic divisions you will highlight in each set. We did city, state, country, continent, and planet. If you will be doing an international set, as we did here, you may have to equate 'state' with a similar, but different, geographic division - we used the Italian regiones or regions. Of course, I also recommend doing this activity with fellow U.S. ancestors, and for those cases, you could probably even add in the county level and even a street level as the smallest division.

I obtained all of the map images from Google Maps. I printed out names of the geographic divisions and the names of each location, and we glued them under the maps. We dedicated the smallest circle on top to our ancestor's photo and name. We laminated our set for durability, but that's not necessary. Simply punch a hole in the top of each circle and connect them all with a book ring.

Don't forget that this and all my other genealogy activities can be found at GrowingLittleLeaves.com

Copyright 2015, Emily Kowalski Schroeder

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Surname Activities

9/20/2014

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To a young child, the idea of having a surname in addition to her first name is sometimes a difficult concept to grasp and understand. But, once a child does understand that some family members share names and that her surname is different from her friend's name, do not be afraid to start talking about your family's history and identity using the surnames in your family tree. Here, I have listed some simple hands-on activities that I have developed to help my kids start to recognize some of the surnames in our family tree. Many of the activities are multi-disciplinary in nature and will also help children with listening, writing, and memory skills.

Tracing and Writing Surnames

Teaching children how to write letters is one of those things in life in which repetition is absolutely the key to success. So, why not spend some of that practice time writing names? If you simply Google, 'blank writing paper,' you will find many websites that offer free, printable preschool and Kindergarten-level writing paper. What if your child is not yet comfortable writing letters on their own? Fortunately, there are also some sites (KB Teachers, WorksheetWorks.com) that will allow you to create worksheets with traceable words. This is exactly what I did for my four year old daughter:

Listening With Google Translate

Last weekend at the breakfast table, I was telling my husband about a surname blog post I had written about one of his German ancestral families with the surname of Waterkotte. I mentioned that I had thrown a Google Translate audio link into the blog post, so that reader could understand better why the surname became Watercutter in the U.S. My six year old son wanted to hear it, so I got out my laptop and played the audio for him. He LOVED it, so I typed in a few other surnames from our family tree and played them in their original ethnic tongues. He was so engaged, and as we were listening to the clips, I was able to mention things like, "This was great-grandma's last name before she was married," and "Grandma K's mom was born in Italy." Using the Sound of Text website, you can play and download an .mp3 audio file of the Google Translate pronunciation of words and phrases up to 100 characters. For example, here is the Polish pronunciation of my paternal grandmother's maiden name, Bodziony.

Matching Activities

Even before children can read, they do have the ability to figure out when two words look the same, and knowing how to recognize the same word over and over again will make learning how to read that much easier when the time comes. So, when you are working on word recognition with young children, why not take a break from some of the typical shorter words like dog, cat, toy, etc. and use surnames? I made a simple matching worksheet in which the child can just draw lines to the same name on each side of the paper. You can include as many or as few names as you want, depending on your individual child's interest and attention span.

Or, you may cut out those names on the sheet, flip them over, and play a traditional matching game with the child. If you find two matching names and you get to keep the pair. The person with the most pairs wins.

Surname Matching // GrowingLittleLeaves.com

Arranging

Perhaps you know an elementary-aged child who is learning how to put words and names in alphabetical order. Or, if you have an middle- or high school-aged child, you can really start to talk about the ethnic origins of individual surnames in your tree. Try sitting down with them, examining the names, and group them into different nationality or language groups.

Mapping

Does your child like looking at maps? The Worldnames Public Profiler website contains a modern-day database of eight million different surnames from 26 countries across the world. Simply type in a name, and the site show you on a map where the name is relatively common, and it will give you statistics on 'frequency per million.' Some regions of the world are better represented than others; for example, most of Europe is well-represented in the data, but, unfortunately, Latin America is not. Here is an example map of Poland using the surname Bodziony:

So, you can see that there are many ways in which to introduce kids to the surnames within their family trees, even if they can yet truly understand what an ancestor is or that great-great-grandpa was alive 100 years ago. If you start talking about and showing them the names now, there is a better chance that they won't be overwhelmed later when they are old enough to begin to understand more of the details associated with their family history.

©2014, copyright Emily Kowalski Schroeder.

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Introducing Immigration - Part 2

3/9/2014

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Introducing Immigration // GrowingLittleLeaves.com

Introducing Immigration - Part 2

In last week's post, I talked about how I used the children's book, Watch the Stars Come Out to introduce the concept of immigration to my children. Today, we went a step further and did a little map exercise to help them put a more visual component to the concept.

I found a world map that came free with one of my National Geographic subscriptions, and I pinned it to a wall, making sure that it was at a height at which the kids could see and interact with it. The rest of the supplies consisted of different colored yarn or string, tape, scissors and pushpins.

First, I helped the kids identify the United States on the map, and we found the city in which we live. Because we watched some of the recent Olympics, they sort of understand what a different country is, and I explained that, on the map, the countries are shown in different colors. Then, I pointed out Europe, we got out our pushpins, and talked about where each grandparent's ancestors came from. (To introduce the concept of an ancestor to your child, see this post.)

We put pushpins on each European country where their ancestors came from - Germany, France, Italy, Croatia, and Poland. (Supervise the kids closely with the pushpins; you could even use small stickers instead, if you are worried about them getting hurt.) My kids are pretty much European mutts, but even if your family's ancestors originated from one nation, this is still a fun and educational activity to do with kids. At one point, my son asked me, "Why aren't we putting any pins here (*points to China*) or here (*points to Russia*)," and I explained to him that if our family HAD come from those parts of the world, we WOULD put them there, but that's just not the case for us.

The next step was to place pushpins in America as the ancestors' "final destination." If you want to keep it simple, you can place one pin in America and that is fine. However, I wanted my kids to understand that the ship couldn't land in the middle of the country (Ohio) where our ancestors ended up - I wanted them to realize that it had to stop at the coastline. So, we put pins in the port cities where the ships landed - New Orleans, Baltimore, New York.

Then, we connected the European push pins to the American push pins with yarn. We used a different color to represent the different 'branches' of our family. We divided it up by their four grandparents. I created a map 'key' so we would know which color matched which grandparent. (My 6yo can read this key, but I think I may add small photos of each grandparent, so my 3yo can know which color represents which grandparent, too.) This portion of the exercise was a bit more ambitious than it needed to be, and it is not necessary to go into such detail, especially with younger kids. Using just one color of yarn for all ancestors will work just fine, if you want to keep it simple.

And, finally, I cut out little paper ships and attached them to a couple of the yarn strands. As my son said, we made little "zip lines" for the ships. I included one sailing ship and one steamship, and explained that, "Daddy's ancestors came to America on sailing ships and Mommy's ancestors came here on steamships, because they came at different times." He was actually pretty interested in the details of ship technology, and wanted to know a bit more about it than I could tell him just off the top of my head!

At this point, I don't expect my kids to remember where Poland or Germany is the next time they look at a map, BUT even just getting kids to look at maps and to realize that they represent much larger spaces and land masses is an important step in geography education. The activity got my son interested in historical travel, and I think it's important for young kids to realize that people didn't always travel long distances by airplane, like they do today. I'm going to leave the map up indefinitely, so they can look at it and 'play' with it whenever they feel like it. (I put it up it next to our family history wall that I created last year, so, hopefully, as the kids get older, they will transition right from this little world map to the more detailed maps, books, and postcards that tell our family's story.)

Within my map stash, I also found a larger wall map of just the United States. At some point, I'd like to hang that one up, too, and maybe talk with the kids about HOW and WHY our family ended up in Ohio. We could again use push pins and yarn to connect the port cities to Ohio, and talk about the different types of transportation people used before cars, and even before trains, in the case of several of my husband's ancestral families.

©2014, copyright Emily Kowalski Schroeder.