Its one thing to try to put yourself in the shoes of our ancestors a hundred years in the past, but trying to imagine an unimaginable seems to be difficult for another reason. Imagine being the ancestor one hundred years in the past, how do you even start?
Historypod (available at: http://www.historypod.net/) is a great daily podcast that focuses mainly on short blurbs educating the listener on what happened on this day (day of the week and month) in history. It can be a fun warm up activity to start the students off by thinking historically. Additionally, because of the variety of events and peoples that are brought up it gives the students a chance to share individual connections they may have with the topic, with the larger class. Also, it can be quite exciting if the the daily topic aligns with what is on, will be on, or has been on the course agenda. In these cases students get to recall and share pre-existing information they already have, or even questions they don’t know the answer to yet.
Further, it can be fun to frame the events that come up in terms of the present and think of the present as the future. Based on hat students already know they can map out along a timeline how we as a species have gotten from A to B.
