There is no set way to learn from archives – that’s what makes them so fun! Please use the information provided in any way you like, however if you are looking for some structured activities or ideas, we have provided some for you here.
Pre-Prepared Activities
Below are links to pre-prepared activities. You can print these out or use them as a template to create your own activities.
Archive Wordsearch
Find all the Archive words that are hidden
Feelings Jigsaw Diary
Pick a colour for each of your feelings and colour in a piece of the jigsaw over the day or week to show how your feelings change.
Today I…
A template for a daily diary
Diary Cover
A front cover for your diary
Other ideas
- Research someone famous (past or present) and try and imagine what their daily diary entries might look like. Imagine you were a world leader trying to run a country just now!
- Keep a daily diary – record what you’re doing and how your life is different from usual. This could be written or recorded through audio or video – however you want to express yourself! Maybe when you’ve finished you could think about offering your diary to your local archive centre so that people can look back at it in the future.
- Pick one of the diaries we’re showing here and see if you can transcribe it (work out what it says and type up a copy)
- Have a look at Malcolm Blane’s diary entry from August 1902. It starts, “One day at a quarter past 3 in the afternoon August 20th 1902, we started for a long bicycle ride from Nairn. This is the map….” Try and make up a story using this as the start. You could research what was happening in 1902 to add some facts in!
- Why not keep a photo diary over the next few weeks? Every day you could take a photo of something you’ve seen or done and then after a few weeks you’ll have a photo diary to look back over!
