Social butterfly

s far as I can tell, the best thing about living in DC is that there are more events than one can ever hope to attend. Better yet, a good portion of them are entirely free to the public, funded by donation or (cough) your tax dollars. After discovering this last summer when attending the outdoor movie series on the National Mall and in Crystal City, I thought, hey, I should put together a calendar of some of the events I'm interested in and share it with people. Presumably, a fair chunk of my [iiiitty-bitty] reader-base is located in the DC metro area, so hopefully someone will find this useful.

The events contained within were discovered via the following:

• The Crystal City/Crystal Screen outdoor movie series. This year's theme is "by the numbers."
• Screen on the Green, brought to you by HBO and a lot of loyal fans. This screen shows more classic movies this year.
• The Freer and Sackler Galleries. Yet more movies, and other events. Remember that I'm selecting things that I'm personally interested in attending. Please check behind the links for more! (Also, stop in the see one of my favorite works by Whistler: the Peacock Room.)
• Kennedy Center Millenium Stage. There's a free performance/concert/show every night all year. 
• The Torpedo Factory. Always has studios and galleries open to the public. 
• Smithsonian Institution, including the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. Obviously I haven't included the (20) museums that are free and awesome on a daily basis, but some special events are on the calendar. 
• Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens. Many DC-ites have raved about both the Aquatic Gardens and the National Arboretum as head-clearing refuges. Check out the water lily festival in July.
• The Library of Congress. The Center for the Book has some interesting book talks, and of course there's the National Book Festival in September (for a whole two days!). 
• Jazz in the Garden, National Gallery of Art. Every Friday evening in the Nat'l Gallery Sculpture Garden. Tends to be a bit crowded, but if you get a good seat (arrive on time) the music is live and you can bring a picnic. 

The calendar will update on this page when new events are added, so check back, or use the "+Google Calendar" button on the bottom right corner to subscribe in Google Calendar. Alternatively, use this .ics file in ical or other calendar applications. 

Suggestions for additions are welcome.

ps. I'm trying out some schmancy drop caps at the top of each post. If they don't display/line up well, let me know. Blogger doesn't have much of a way to add something like that without it being an image, and because the settings for images (e.g. the border) are universal, I don't think I can change that for an individual post. 

LC-Primary Sources

I recently became more interested in exploring the Library of Congress both as a resource, an entity, and (because everything is right now) as a place to potentially work. Today I ran across this in my news feed: The Library of Congress Teacher's Page. It's intended to provide primary sources for the typical classroom lesson, and dabbles in most of the standard themes we all went through in school.

Several things struck me immediately. First, there are pre-constructed lesson plans available (there's not log in to the site, which is nice. Yay free information!). Now this may just be me, but I'd be irked if I knew my teacher was pulling something straight off the internet. However, using some of these for ideas and as support could be good. An example:

I'm interested in WWII, so I browse down the lesson plan list (by theme) to there, and find... mostly sources from the great depression. Hm. Actually there's nothing from the war in there, so I try "What is an American." This gets me a reference to de Crevecoeur (surprise), and some "life history" stories collected by the WPA. There's also an extensive, drawn out lesson plan, which (dear god) takes up classes from September to June! eesh. In any case, a teacher who knows what they want to present to the class could use the lesson plan themes to track down the sources. Kind of neat, but like most things on the internet, a lot of links to click through to find what you want.

A simple search using the search box on the front page brings up a few more hits for "World War Two", but it's still all within lesson plans and feels like it's being handed to me: This is what you should know! *ribbon on top* The point of the Teacher pages is primary sources, and if you dig a little you can get to a good chunk of information, but it can't possibly be everything the Library has. However, I do definitely support using primary sources for research, as they allow students to put more effort into reading and analyzing, unlike standard textbooks. Students will also get first hand perspectives and different voices from a primary source, which makes the experience of learning less monotonous, and hopefully more engaging.

Without the structure of a lesson plan, I think it's wildly entertaining to just browse the collections. And just in case everything the Library has isn't enough, they provide a nicely selected set of links from the outside.