When I was 8 or 9 years old I spent some time with my father’s brother’s family and my aunt took me to a pioneer school for the day, I believe with my cousin that’s my age. I don’t remember all the details but I remember the school because she dressed me in a bonnet and skirt and apron and packed a lunch for me in a tin pail and we spent the morning (not very long) doing lessons on slates and reading from their old grammar books and then toured the little farm after lunch and saw the animals and milking and such. It was SO neat that I remember it fondly still and I was excited to see that the Log Cabin Village in Fort Worth has something similar! Groups of at least 15 can do the same thing and it’s only $5 per child ($75 minimum) and you provide the teacher but they provide the curriculum for the morning fun and after lunch you get their “Meet the Pioneer” program tour. I want to do that as soon as I don’t have a nursing baby and the kids are old enough that we could take most of them. How fun would that be??? (Becky, don’t move until we do that – not that you are planning to move right now but we have to do that!)

Pioneer school curriculum from Log Cabin Village in Fort Worth.

Farmer’s Branch Historical Park Teacher Packet

Rwanda lesson plan.

Beyond Anne Frank

Genocide education guidelines.

From Holocaust Museum Houston.

Not advised for children under age 10 to visit the museum but exploring the site now and here’s the Group_Student_Tours_Guide.PDF

Reviewed the Anne Frank books from the library, before they are ready for the actual diary these are good. In order of younger kids (K to 2nd-ish in my estimate) then older elementary (3rd to 5th) and the third book I would say 6th grade and up, depending on your child’s temperament and ability to handle this knowledge: Anne Frank by Josephine Poole, a picture book that is very gentle in how it handles things. Good for early elementary age. Who was Anne Frank? by Ann Abramson is illustrated and tells the story and would be good for reading in later elementary, before the journal itself. I’ve only skimmed it but the drawings are not scary and they handle the situation directly but without detail – “At the camp most people were put to death right away. Life for those who weren’t could hardly be called life at all. Survivors say it is impossible to describe how awful it was.” The Importance of Anne Frank b John F. Wukovits has some of the story interwoven with the broader historical context and photos – one of children (looking very healthy, oddly enough) in a concentration camp, an emaciated survivor dying after liberation, and a very shadowed picture of a boxcar with bodies (that appear to be sleeping.) This would probably be a good read alongside the diary but I would NOT present this to children until later elementary and would not yet show it to C at 9 years of age. These images were very benign compared to photos I saw at the concentration camp we visited when I was 11 or 12 years old (photos that are forever burned into my memory) but would still be very disturbing for kids – even more so if they are aware of the context. Still a good book but one to be used later.

I don’t know how good a judge I am of when to present this, either, since I visited a concentration camp when I was later elementary age and took a field trip to visit Anne Frank’s home in 5th grade so I was seeing the images and a lot more detail than kids probably get stateside. I want to teach my children these things but I want to do it when I feel they are able to emotionally handle the complexity of the topic… and at nine years old we’re sticking to the generalities right now, I’m not going into detail and I’m not showing him any images that are going to cause nightmares.