My Home is an online multi-sensory activity to encourage people to consider homes across the world, what makes them different and how life at home can be similar. It features photographs and artwork from our collections, looking at different buildings, neighbourhoods and countries.
It prompts discussion about the buildings we live in and what home means to us. It’s meant to be fun, so we have worked with Qualtrics to design quizzes and have chosen games and activities for people to enjoy as part of the activity, both online and at home. We recommend you follow the five sections below in order, but you don’t need to use every image or do every suggested activity. Just choose or adapt the ones that are most suitable for your students.
My Home is an accessible activity, designed in partnership with members of Mencap Bexley, Share community and SEND specialist Noel Hayden. Prompts and instructions are supported by videos showing key word signing and all photographs and images are visually described through alternative text accessible via screen readers. We recommend use of tablets to view the images as they can be magnified to individuals’ preferences in order to see the detail.
You can click on all images to show larger versions. If you or your users find the ‘visual search’ icon that may appear in the top right corner distracting, you can disable this by clicking on the three dots underneath it and disabling the option ‘Show hover menu on image hover’ (this is a browser setting and not related to the resource).
We have many thousands of photographs in our collection at The National Archives. The black and white photographs you can see here were taken between 1926 and 1965. The more colourful artwork and designs date from earlier.
There is an Introduction and four further sections:
The Introduction explains a little about The National Archives, how the building looks from the outside and what it holds.
Part 1 explores what a home looks like on the outside and its local area. There are discussion prompts, sound guessing games, a sensory map activity, ideas for a sound poem and spotting activities.
Part 2 features what happens inside your home, the people and pets you live with, the items and activities. There are conversation starters, quizzes, listening activities and an object guessing game.
Part 3 is for arts and crafts. People can design their ideal front door or room using downloadable templates. There are ideas for how to make your design unique and instructions on what you will need. We show how Nimisha, one of our contributors, has made a house using recycled materials, including cardboard, plastic, foil and other packaging. Inspiring!
Part 4 is an activity using a map showing the locations of a number of images from this resource. It comes with fun activities that help show how wide the geographic spread of these photos are.
You can also print out a certificate for participants who finish the activities in the resource to congratulate them!
We hope you enjoy these activities. Please let us know how you get on.
We can also arrange Zoom workshops using this resource. Please contact us for details:
outreach@nationalarchives.gov.uk
NB: The images contained in these resources come from historical documents held at The National Archives. Most were originally created to serve the purposes of government: for documentation, learning, publicity, or propaganda. Some photographs depict unnamed individuals, are staged, and may present historical viewpoints. They are presented in their original formats, in the same way we preserve original language contained in the records, to help us fully understand the past.