Children and history
October 26, 2011
3 Comments
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Legal Stuff (Summary: Give credit where it’s due!)
My Own Time Machine by Sabra Smith is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
Based on a work at myowntimemachine.wordpress.com.Wayback machine
Nostalgic for the original Wayback Machine?
My Own Time Machine: Buildings, Places, People & Things 
These pictures are fantastic and what a great idea to have the kids make family portraits as gifts. I may steal this idea; the wheels are turning. Years ago, in a class all my daughters took in turn, they were instructed to make a full-body self-tracing and then paint it in. After hanging in the classroom for a while, the tattered remains were rolled up and sent home. I cut them off at the shoulders and framed them. There’s just something magical about the way children see.
I was informed by a third-grader that his class also had this experience of transforming a tiny “historical” thumbnail into a painted portrait so it seems the entire elementary school did this exercise. Kind of like having a “pen pal” across the ages (wow, there’s a whole new concept — if you could write letters to someone “long ago” and that person would write back telling you about their recent experiences and answer questions… )
Thanks for posting more of these portraits, Sabra! Seeing them together, it occurs to me that they all have interesting backgrounds–they’re not in rooms or outside, the original subjects are posed in regular portraits but the students have chosen to add color and designs that really make their interpretations stand out. So, props to the art teacher for pointing out the need for backgrounds to start with and my admiration to the young artists who have taken the concept and run with it with so much originality!