Ideas to appeal to kids

I’ve talked with a middle-school librarian who says that kids are interested in weird, gross, or scary things. She suggested I focus a bit on his connection to the Salem witch trials, but I’m nervous that it would inappropriately glorify it, and it’s only related in a small way to Hawthorne. I agree with you. There is a story about a Raymond husband and wife who froze to death when Hawthorne lived in Raymond, I believe the couples daughter was taken in by the Mannings and that Hawthorne later uses the story in his writing. That could be interesting? Yes, that was the Tarbox family and the little girl was Betsy, I believe-JM.

I would like to have a display that has some visual depictions of things for period children. Little knives for cutting quill pens, clothes, school desks, etc. things children today can understand but don’t have. There is a specific style of drawing that I find quite appealing by Eric Sloan. The diagram below is his work and he has endless interesting diagrams on so many historic and natural subjects.  Great ideas here.

I’m not sure if it would even be possible to get rights to his work but I’d be interested, or if not his work specifically something of this nature would be okay.

I talked with Rose from RCHS, and she has a scavenger hunt for children to complete on their visits, it’s a really good idea. Easy to execute and easy to engage the kids with. When I mentioned the idea to the middle school librarian she thought the kids would expect a prize. I know the scavenger hunt and it is fun for the kids, but a hunt for objects might be too disruptive. If we could orient them to look for written clues as opposed to objects, it would encourage them to read the displays.  e.g. “In what year(s) did NH attend Bowdoin college?”