These Resources and Activities will help students appreciate photography, farm life, and suggest ideas to research their own roots through photography or geneaology.

Identifying Farm Jobs in Antique Photographs: Elementary students list jobs or chores that the people in the photographs are doing or have done in relation to the subject of the image. (HTML version) (pdf version)

Mechanization in Farming at the End of the 19th Century: Students in middle school and up read background pages on how a reduction in man hours balanced by an increase in expenditure on farm machinery changed the way farms were run, causing many small farms to go out of business. Discussion is pertinent to today's farming methods of hog mega-farms, and endangered small family farms. (HTML version) (pdf version)

Coming of Age on a Farm (1900): A literature lesson on Richard Peck's young adult novel Fair Weather compares the lives of the two heroines of the novel with that of Mary Sadorus, as seen in the Sadorus photographs. (HTML version) (pdf version)

Analyzing a Photograph Historically: Students in middle school and up analyze a photograph in the Sadorus Collection and in their own family or school collection of vintage photos according to specific criteria to identify social, historical, cultural, and factual characteristics. (HTML version) (pdf version)

Outdoor Photography: students in grade 5 and up take photographs with disposable or digital cameras of their immediate landscape (or detail of one), favorite people and places, home or school, and download them to a computer. They add a paragraph, story, or description that reflects their feelings for the place and people in the photograph and the reason for them that it evokes a sense of their place and time. (HTML version) (pdf version)

Create a Photographic Family Tree: students in grade 3 through 6 obtain copies of photographs of siblings, parents, grandparents, etc. and mount them on a tagboard family tree chart. For grades 7 through 10, students scan them into the computer to arrange as a family tree chart in Photoshop or other image program. (HTMLversion) (pdf version)

The American Farm as Portrayed by Artists: middle school and high school students search the Museum's Web site and other Web sites for paintings of American farms by artists of the 19th and 20th centuries. Artists' views of the farm echoed the national views of Manifest Destiny, nostalgia, and social comment of the Great Depression. How do artists portray farmers today? (HTML version) (pdf version)

Resources:
Sadorus, Illinois has a Web site that contains pages on the history and residents of the town.

A biography of Grandpap Sadorus appears on this Web page.