When you have the eye of a teacher especially when homeschooling, just about anything you see is fair game to turn into an educational lesson. Whether it stem from trying to identify all of the bugs you turned up while gardening with your child or studying something that catches your eye in daily life, you can make a lesson out of anything.
For example, a Bulova watch is a high end watch that has a history stretching to before my grandfather was born. Some of the highlights of reading the history of this company are names, dates and numbers that help bring up new topics of inquiry.
Here are a few examples to ponder. In 1927, Bulova honored Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic solo flight from New York to Paris. Not only did they sell out of the commemorative watch but it makes for an easy lead in question of ‘Who is Charles Lindbergh?” Anyone with a 6-8 year old knows just how curious they get with the questions.
As an exercise in math, we can take a marketing effort in 1932 called “Name the Watch” which gave out a top prize of $1000. As the article says, that is the equivalent to about $12,500 in the year 2000. What a lovely demonstration of how to mathematically figure out the average rate of inflation with such handy fixed data points.
And the final example is from the accomplishments in the year 1960 when NASA requested Bulova to bring its expertise to bear in the space program. This by itself can set off a whole new line of study surrounding the history of NASA and the space program.
There are many more lesson ideas to be found in the history of a single company. Give it a try and see what you come up with.
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