Last year my son chose the word ephemera to highlight for a vocabulary project. He’s totally my kid!
We collect in my household as I have mentioned before, and not just objects. We are ephemera collectors too. Printed items: ticket stubs, cards, brochures, invitations, and old credit cards. You name it, one of us in our house has stored it for safekeeping.
When my son was young I was an avid scrapbooker. I still have the scrapbook room, now just full of photos and files of ephemera waiting to be placed in a scrapbook.
Pieces of ephemera can hold a lot of memories. Ephemera is also considered a tool of the history trade. Placed along other primary sources ephemera can unlock historical mysteries and open a window into the past, revealing relationships and building connections to tell the full story of a civilization, event, or time period.
Now that my house is filling up with larger antiques, I find myself gravitating to ephemera when I antique. Recently I have picked up old letters, holiday cards, and a few advertisements ripped from magazines. I wrote about some of my favorite resources for using ephemera in the classroom in another Museum Monday post here.
I recently picked up this old advertisement for Cream of Wheat (one of my favorite foods as a child) and today I wanted to talk specifically about using advertisements in the classroom.
Here are some of my favorite teacher resources for teaching with advertisements.
Teaching American History in Maryland
With all the emphasis on media literacy lately, why not tie in history and literacy by using historical advertisements in the classroom?
Jill Cross 