At Home: 1950: Arthur Turner: Activities

Suggested Activities

1. Oral interviews

The purpose of this interview is to compare and contrast the experiences of living in the city vs. living in the suburbs.

Think of friends or relatives that you know who have lived in either the city or the suburbs. You may have classmates who live in the city or the suburbs, depending on where your school is located.

Ask the person you are interviewing the following kinds of questions:

Describe your house or apartment.
What does your surrounding neighborhood look like?
Where do you go grocery shopping?
How do you get to school?
What do you like most and what do you like least about where you live?

Make sure you take notes during your interview. You may even want to record the interview using a tape recorder. Notes or a tape recording will give you a "record" of your subject's memories and thoughts. Your subject is the person you have interviewed.

2. Creating A Class Exhibit: The Teenager's Room

As a class, collaborate and invent what you think is representative of the typical teenager's room. Design an exhibit space based on this room, and invite other classes to come and view it.

Individual preparation:

Think about what your room means to you.
Write an essay about your room.
Look at Side by Side for an idea of the types of essays other teenagers have written about their rooms.

As a class:

Read each other's essays.
Choose the best essays to serve as didactive material for your exhibit.
Generate a list of typical items or objects found in most teenagers' rooms.
Volunteer to bring in an object from this list for the exhibit.
Create a museum label for your object. Look at the objects in this section for ideas on how to write an object label.

As you prepare to assemble your exhibit, make a check list of the different components in an exhibit. You can use this website for ideas or visit a museum near your school.

Other exhibit ideas:

Interview people from different generations and create an exhibit that compares and contrasts teenagers' bedrooms over the decade.
Imagine what the typical teenager's room might look like in the future.

3. Completing the Timeline

Write a timeline from 1990 to the present. In your timeline, don't forget to include:

Significant political, economic, and social events that have taken place in Illinois, America, and the world.
Happenings in the music and entertainment industries.
Cultural and artistic events with great popular appeal.

Create a specialized timeline that relates to your specific interests--arts & entertainment, music, sports, politics, economics, social affairs, international affairs, religion,...etc.

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