For: Kids 10-14
Required: Reference sources.
Ask your kids the same question, then see if they can collect enough research to piece together a bio. Offer some standard questions to "ask" during the time travel, such as: How did you become an inventor? What did you like best in school? What are your favorite foods? What kind of music do you like? What kinds of things do you do for fun? And what do you think is your most important contribution to the world?
Suggest that your child can learn a lot about the person's life by collecting other information about the time period in which the interviewee lived, the location, and other personal information.
For added fun, your children can turn the interviews into speeches in which they impersonate the historical character, perhaps even looking for props. Yet another variation entails miming the character and seeing who can guess the identity. Aha! The key and the paper cut out like a kite is a dead giveway for ...