Trading Places
An eighteenth-century colonial main street was lined with stores and craftsmen advertising their wares. Can you envision what such a street might have looked like?
a talented silversmith’s apprentice wounds his hand in a furnace accident. Suddenly he needs to find a new trade. While trying to figure out what to do, Johnny wanders the streets of Boston, where shop signs advertise the storekeepers’ wares:
A pair of scissors for a tailor, a gold lamb for a wool weaver, a basin for a barber, a painted wooden book for a bookbinder, a large swinging compass for an instrument-maker.
Although more and more people were learning how to read, the artisans still had signs above their shops, not wishing to lose a possible patron merely because he happened to be illiterate.
—Chapter III, Johnny Tremain
Making your sign
· Come to me for a copy of the Sign of the Times reproducible. Your copy will have an eighteenth-century trade that will be secretly assigned just to you. Do not tell anyone what your trade is. Other students in the class will try to guess after you have completed your sign.
· Research what someone with that skill did for a living to create your own shop signs in the social studies textbooks or the Internet. Make sure that you work with pictures, rather than words, so that any colonist would be able to clearly understand what service their shop provides.
· Write Trading Places on a sheet of construction paper and glue your sign down. They will be posted in the hallway when finished.
An eighteenth-century colonial main street was lined with stores and craftsmen advertising their wares. Can you envision what such a street might have looked like?
a talented silversmith’s apprentice wounds his hand in a furnace accident. Suddenly he needs to find a new trade. While trying to figure out what to do, Johnny wanders the streets of Boston, where shop signs advertise the storekeepers’ wares:
A pair of scissors for a tailor, a gold lamb for a wool weaver, a basin for a barber, a painted wooden book for a bookbinder, a large swinging compass for an instrument-maker.
Although more and more people were learning how to read, the artisans still had signs above their shops, not wishing to lose a possible patron merely because he happened to be illiterate.
—Chapter III, Johnny Tremain
Making your sign
· Come to me for a copy of the Sign of the Times reproducible. Your copy will have an eighteenth-century trade that will be secretly assigned just to you. Do not tell anyone what your trade is. Other students in the class will try to guess after you have completed your sign.
· Research what someone with that skill did for a living to create your own shop signs in the social studies textbooks or the Internet. Make sure that you work with pictures, rather than words, so that any colonist would be able to clearly understand what service their shop provides.
· Write Trading Places on a sheet of construction paper and glue your sign down. They will be posted in the hallway when finished.