In this challenging time, many parents and guardians are looking online for meaningful activities for their children that don’t require too much prep or too many materials. Each weekday on this blog, the Museum of Jewish Heritage – A Living Memorial to the Holocaust will post an activity geared to a range of ages that guide children how to explore heritage, history, and learning through artifacts.
On Friday, we explored how to choose a family artifact and conduct an interview to learn more about it. Today, we will explore how to use this information to create an artifact label, the way that we have artifact labels for objects in our Museum.
Begin by asking your child about what they know about museums:
- What text or writing do you see when you visit a museum?
- Why do museums have written information next to an object? What information can we find there?
In museums, we have text that tells us the name of a gallery, so we know what it is about. A gallery panel gives an introduction to the gallery and tells us some information we need to know about the group of objects we’re about to view. An artifact label tells us important facts, including what the object is, when it is from, where it is from, what it is made out of, and who donated it to a museum. It also gives us other information to understand the significance of the artifact and why it is included in the museum and the gallery.
Using the interview your child conducted yesterday, they can begin to draft a label for the family artifact they chose. Use the worksheet linked here to include the important information that someone viewing the artifact would need to know. After completing the worksheet (click here for an example of a completed worksheet), other family members can interview your child about what they learned about their family from the artifact and interview.
We encourage you to share your child’s artifact and label with us so that we can create a virtual family history museum! Please email photographs to education@mjhnyc.org so that we can feature them on our Museum blog!