SUBJECT MATTER: Social Studies; History
Students should be able to:
From the National Standards for History, grades K-4 www.sscnet.ucla.edu/nchs/standards
Students will :
PREP FOR TEACHER
Prior to the teaching, bookmark all of the web sites used in the lesson. Load any plug-ins necessary to run the web sites. Cue the videotape to the appropriate starting point. Copy the worksheet that will accompany the lesson. Collect sample specimens of items that could be used for the time capsule. Access authentic diary excerpts via books, libraries or the Internet. Have excerpts available for students to read.
Per group of five:
Westward Expansion edtech.kennesaw.edu/web//westward.html Research and information site.
Idaho History www.encarta.msn.com
Hat fashions of the early 19th century www.pinedale.com/misc/settlement.shtml
Diary entries www.isu.edu/~trinmich/00.n.dairies.html
The following activities
will prepare students for a lesson on the early exploration of Idaho and
allow them to explore the differences between the present and past.
Step 1: Establishing Personal Connection to History Explain to your students that you will be discussing historical events in the state of Idaho beginning in the year 1805. How many years ago was 1805? Ask your students to calculate (___ years).
Draw a timeline on the board to span the years between 1805 and 2001. Use yourself as an example. Mark your birth date on the timeline. Continue back with your father and grandfathers’ birth dates. Continue this process back to the beginning of the 19th century. Estimate the birth dates of ancestors if exact dates are unknown.
The intent is to get a general idea of how many generations of people have lived since that time. If an individual were born in the year 1850, how old would he or she be right now? Is it possible to interview anyone born then? How do we know what happened in their lives? Ask students to think about how we determine what life was like that long ago.
Discuss ways to record daily activities. Based on their existing knowledge of technology, ask students to brainstorm various ways to record events. Enlist the students’ assistance in creating a Venn diagram to list ways of recording events in the present as compared to the 1800s. Ideas may include: videotape, digital camera, tape recorder, letters, diaries, and pictographs. Ask your students if they know when their families came to Idaho.
Family research is
a popular pastime in our area. Be prepared to let children share information.
Do any of them have diaries written by ancestors? Explain to students
that diaries and other artifacts left behind help future generations understand
what life was like during different time periods. Read authentic excerpts
from diaries kept by pioneers. Discuss the subjects recorded. Note the
things the person wrote about: weather, visitors, daily chores, etc. Note
the things the person did not write about: movies, television, Nintendo,
Step 2: Establishing
Lifestyle Context for History Ask the students to think about the ways
in which their lives are different than the lives of children of the 1800s.
Write K-W-L on the board and have children brainstorm for ideas about
what the class already knows about pioneer life. Explain to the students
that the class will be able to list additional facts that they discover
(Learn) after completing the following activity.
Provide your students with a FOCUS FOR MEDIA INTERACTION, by providing them with a worksheet with questions that can be answered using information from the web site. After the students have examined the site and recorded the answers to the questions, ask them to share their answers with the class. Record the pieces of information the students discovered under the L heading (what we Learned).
Step 1: Explain to your students that the class will now examine the lives of early explorers to the state of Idaho. The information will be presented in video format. Insert Proceeding On…Visions of Idaho (available through Idaho Public Television) into the VCR. Divide students into groups of two. Explain to them that one student from each group will act as the recorder. The video discusses the various groups of people that came to Idaho beginning in the year 1805.
Step 2: Provide the students with a FOCUS FOR MEDIA INTERACTION and ask them to raise their hands when they hear the narrator talk about some of the things that interrupted the Native American seasonal round up and endangered their food supply. PLAY the video until the screen is filled with a picture of a wagon wheel with the sun shining brightly behind it. STOP the video.
Ask the students if they feel white people should have continued to do things the way Native Americans had or whether it was acceptable to bring new ways of doing things to the New Territory. RESUME the video. Step 3: Provide the students with a FOCUS FOR MEDIA INTERACTION, and ask them to raise their hands when they hear the number of schools that were in operation in the 1860s.
PLAY the video until the screen is filled with a black and white photograph of a group of school children. PAUSE the video and ask the students to think about the changes Idaho schools have experienced since that time. The narrator said Idaho had three schools. How many schools do we have in the town of ______ today? Ask the students to consider how schools in the 1800’s would be different from today’s schools.. How would they be similar?
Provide students with a FOCUS FOR MEDIA INTERACTION by having them write down the names of each major group of explorers as it is introduced during the rest of the video. RESUME the video until the end. When the tape is finished, ask the groups to list the main groups of explorers that the video discussed. The lists should include: The Lewis and Clark Expedition, fur trader, trappers, gold miners, and settlers.
POST VIEWING ACTIVITIES
Step 2: Explain
to the students that they will choose one of the groups of people discussed
in the video and conduct research on the Internet. Ask them to be sure
to answer questions such as: what did the group use for shelter, what
did they do for entertainment, what did they eat, how did they communicate/correspond,
why did they travel west (to trap beaver, to search for gold, etc.). As
they gather information, the students will consider the following assignment:
Students will pretend that they lived during the 1800’s. They are trappers,
gold diggers, or settlers. Students will create time capsules with items
used by the groups of people they researched.
Step 3: Explain
to the students that the items placed in the time capsule need to be representative
of the time period and lifestyle in which their chosen group lived. Do
not include the year in diary entries. They don’t want to make it too
easy to figure out! Perhaps the date was smudged or was burned. Theoretically,
any person in the future that examines the items contained in the capsule
should be able to deduce when and where the time capsule originated.
Step 4: Tell
the students that the completed time capsules will be delivered to a fifth
grade class (these students studied Idaho history last year and may be
able to make accurate assumptions based on their recently acquired knowledge).
The fifth grade students will examine the artifacts and try to determine
their origin based on the contents. Their teacher will instruct them to
guess what types of people created the time capsule and make deductions
about the lifestyles and livelihoods of these “people from the past.”
Their guesses will be recorded and placed in the time capsules. They will
be returned to the 4th grade students.
Step 5: Explain to the students that they will discover how well they represented their chosen group by the inferences made by the 5th grade class. How accurate were their guesses?
For additional lesson plans and ideas relating to this topic and many others try TeacherSource at PBS Online! You will find activities, lesson plans, teacher guides and links to other great educational web sites! Search the database by keyword, grade level or subject area! Mathline and Scienceline are also great resources for teachers seeking teaching tips, lesson plans, assessment methods, professional development, and much more!
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