Locate Yourself on a Map of the Americas
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Description
Young students locate themselves on a map and explore spatial relationships among geographic features.
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This is a straightforward lesson that introduces K-2 students to the concept of geographical location and scale. Using a variety of different maps, the lesson helps students understand the way that countries are situated within continents, states within countries, and cities within states.
Designed for a single-period, the lesson begins with students identifying the continent and country in which they live. Then, students begin to move to progressively more specific scales, locating the state or district in which they live, and eventually their school. Along the way, the plan calls for discussion of the number and size of states and districts, and the relative scale of different cities and towns.
The lesson is built around National Geographic’s MapMaker kit for the Americas—part of their larger MapMaker kit collection. For first-time users, video tutorials are available, and each kit enables the user to download, print, and assemble maps of varying scales. Map sizes range from “mega maps” designed for walls to one-page outline maps designed for individual study.
The strength of this lesson is that it introduces a key concept in historical thinking: geographical location and spatial relationships. By helping students understand the relationships between and among various locations, it establishes an important foundation for students in early elementary grades to learn about historical context. The website isn’t always the most intuitive to navigate, but persistence pays off with high-quality free resources.
Topic
Geographical location and spatial relationships
Time Estimate
50 Minutes
flexibility_scale
3
Rubric_Content_Accurate_Scholarship
N/A, the focus of this K-2 lesson is geography.
Rubric_Content_Historical_Background
N/A
Rubric_Content_Read_Write
No
Rubric_Analytical_Construct_Interpretations
No
Rubric_Analytical_Close_Reading_Sourcing
Yes, requires close reading of maps.
Rubric_Scaffolding_Appropriate
Yes
Rubric_Scaffolding_Supports_Historical_Thinking
Yes
Rubric_Structure_Assessment
Assessment checks for understanding of geographical relationships, no criteria.
Rubric_Structure_Realistic
Yes
Rubric_Structure_Learning_Goals
Yes
The Object of History
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The Center for History and New Media and the Smithsonian National Museum of American History created this website to model both historical thinking about artifacts as primary sources and possible best practices for sharing museum collections online. With the site, students can curate their own virtual history exhibits, using documents and expert interviews related to six core artifacts from different time periods. The "Guide" section introduces users to how and why artifacts are important to historians. Seven 300- to 600-word essays argue that artifacts tell stories, create connections between people, hold many different meanings, capture moments, and reflect changes. After learning how historians relate to artifacts, users can tour model exhibits in "Objects," focusing on six Smithsonian-held artifacts: Thomas Jefferson's lapdesk, the gold nugget that started the California Gold Rush, a dress that belonged to Mary Todd Lincoln, an 1898 voting machine, the Woolworth counter where a sit-in took place in 1960, and a short-handled hoe used by farmworkers in the 1960s and 1970s.
Using the more than 220 expert interviews and primary sources from the "Object" model exhibits, students can create their own six-item exhibit.
An "Introduction" for each artifact includes a short introductory video placing it in its historical context and a virtual version of the artifact. Users can zoom in and out on the virtual artifact, rotate it, or click to discover interactive hot spots. Clicking "Explore" in each exhibit provides further information on the object, its place in history, and its history as a museum artifact. Interviews with Smithsonian experts and related primary sources enrich "Explore" sections. "Tour" demonstrates how the interviews and sources in "Explore" can be pulled together into exhibits: either a short 4- to 5-piece "Brief Tour" or a 5- to 13-piece "Extended Tour." "Resources" rounds up annotated links to websites with more information on topics related to each artifact. "Activity" is the heart of the site. Using the more than 220 expert interviews and primary sources from the "Object" model exhibits, students can create their own six-item exhibit. After selecting the objects that reveal the perspective or tell the story they wish to convey and labeling the objects with interpretative text, students can email their finished exhibits to their teacher (or to themselves). For even more information on the six core artifacts, users can listen to experts' recorded answers to questions about the artifacts in "Forums." The 16 recordings run from 13 minutes to an hour. The site may take time to learn to navigate and use, and sorting through the many interviews and primary sources to curate an exhibit can be frustrating (interviews and sources can be displayed by collection, but not searched). However, the site can still provide an introduction to what makes artifacts unique as primary sources, and the skills historians use to interpret artifacts and create museum exhibits.
Zinn Education Project
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Created by the nonprofit organizations Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change, the Zinn Education Project works to bring resources exploring the “role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history” into the classroom. Inspired by the work of historian Howard Zinn, author of the popular A People's History of the United States, the website provides teachers with materials for expanding on these historical narratives.
“Teaching Materials” contains the bulk of the site's content, including more than 100 teaching activities. These can be downloaded in PDF form following free registration, and include essays, articles, interviews, and full lesson plans on topics related to marginalized groups and labor history. Titles range from “Exploring Women's Rights: The 1908 Textile Strike in a 1st-grade Class” to “What the Tour Guide Didn’t Tell Me: Tourism, Colonialism, and Resistance in Hawai'i”.
“Teaching Materials” also contains more than 300 annotations on audio resources, fiction and nonfiction books, films, posters, commercial teaching guides, websites, and Spanish/bilingual resources. Annotations consist of 2–3 sentences describing the resource and its relevance to Zinn's focus and classroom use.
“Teaching Materials” can be browsed by date (either selected on a timeline, or chosen from 16 time periods, ranging from “Colonialism” to “20th Century” ) or searched by one of 29 themes, five reading levels, or by type of material (teaching activity .pdfs, audio, books: fiction, books: nonfiction, films, posters, teaching guides, websites, or Spanish/bilingual).
Useful to teachers wanting to expand on the traditional textbook narratives on marginalized groups and labor history.
Teaching the Bill of Rights
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Middle-school teacher Christine Valenti explains how she introduces the vocabulary of the Bill of Rights to students and how necessary it is to have a good understanding of the Amendments and their language before teaching the topic.
TeacherServe
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These three collections of essays, commissioned from distinguished scholars are designed to deepen content knowledge in American history and offer fresh ideas for teaching. Essays include many links to primary source texts in the National Humanities Center’s Toolbox Library. Divining America: Religion in American History features 36 essays, divided into three subcategories: "The 17th and 18th Centuries," "The 19th Century," and "The 20th Century." Topics range from "Native American Religion in Early America" to "The Christian Right," and include Puritanism, the First and Second Great Awakenings, abolitionism, Islam in the U.S., African American Christianity, American Jewish experience, U.S. Roman Catholicism, and Mormonism. Nature Transformed: The Environment in American History features 17 essays, divided into "Native Americans and the Land," "Wilderness and the American Identity," and "The Use of the Land." These focus on the changing ways in which North Americans have related to the natural world and its resources. Topics include, “The Columbian Exchange,” “The Effects of Removal on American Indian Tribes,” “Cities and Suburbs,” and “Environmental Justice for All.” Freedom's Story: Teaching African American Literature and History addresses topics ranging from the early 1600s through to contemporary times. These 20 essays include, “How to Read a Slave Narrative,” “Segregation,” “The Trickster in African American Literature,” “Jazz in African American Literature,” and “The Civil Rights Movement: 1968-2008.” Essays provide an overview of the topic. “Guiding Discussion” offers suggestions on introducing the subject to students, and “Historians Debate” notes secondary sources with varied views on the topic. Notes and additional resources complete each essay.
History Explorer
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In 2008, the Smithsonian launched History Explorer, in partnership with Verizon's Thinkfinity. Designed as a portal into the National Museum of American History's online resources, the site lets users search or browse the museum's resources. Use the keyword search to look up artifacts, interactives/media, lessons/activities, primary sources, reviewed websites, reference materials, and worksheets; narrow the search by selecting grade levels, historical era, resource type (artifact, lesson, worksheet, etc.), and/or cross-curricular connection.
Or browse by content type, using the tabs at the top of the page—"Lessons and Activities" contains more than 300 resources designed for teacher presentation; "Interactives and Media" contains more than 100 resources including audio, video, or interactive components; and "Museum Artifacts" contains more than 300 artifacts suitable for object-based learning. All individual entries list related content and relevant National History Standards and teaching strategies.
"Themes" offers collections of resources for major U.S. history topics such as immigration and civil rights; "Books" lists synopses for nearly 300 books suitable for reading levels varying from preschool to adult; and "Teacher Resources" includes information on teaching with primary sources, webinars, and joining the Thinkfinity Community. Check "Web Links" for links out to more than 100 history websites, chosen for design, usability, and content.
Mystery Strategy for Elementary Students
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Article Body
What Is It?
Using the premise of a mystery to solve, elementary students act as history detectives as they explore a historical question and analyze carefully chosen clues to formulate and test hypotheses.
Rationale
This strategy depends on our need to solve mysteries. Students are given an opportunity to be active learners as they solve a historical mystery. This strategy relates to what historians do and the process of historical inquiry. Students must work with evidence, form hypotheses, test those hypotheses, and report their findings.
Goals
The goals of the mystery strategy are to learn to: 1. gather, organize, and process information; 2. formulate and test hypotheses; 3. think creatively and analytically to solve problems; and 4. develop, defend, and present solutions to problems.
Teacher Preparation
1. Choose an topic that contains a mystery such as “Why did the American beaver almost become extinct in the 1840s?” Other examples of appropriate historical mysteries include: “How did flooding in Mississippi in 1931 hinder the Civil Rights Movement?”; “Who really invented the cotton gin?”; and “Was the Boston Massacre really a massacre?”
Data should tease the student without revealing too much.
2. Gather primary and secondary sources that will serve as clues for students such as letters, diary entries, maps, statistical tables, political cartoons, images, artifacts for students to touch (in this case beaver fur or felt), and web articles. These sources should pique students’ interest and provide them with clues that will help them generate theories. For example, if students are given a clue regarding the habitat and species characteristics of the beaver and then also told John Jacob Astor was the wealthiest man in America in 1848 it is hoped they conclude that Astor’s wealth had something to do with the beaver. Maps indicating trade routes should confirm this conclusion. Though they may be encountering names in the clues for the first time, making educated guesses is an essential ingredient to the mystery strategy. Students should not be afraid of making guesses or presenting ideas to the larger group. The learning goal is about what it takes to arrive at a hypothesis rather than ending up with a right answer. 3. Decide student grouping. If using small groups, keep individual needs in mind such as reading levels, ability to work with others, and Individual Education Plans (IEPs). 4. Decide how to present the clues to students (strips of paper within envelopes at stations, single sheets of paper for them to cut apart, etc.). See examples of clues for additional clues. Teachers should read through materials to pull clues that fit students’ needs and abilities.
In the Classroom
1. Students read through clues and sort them according to common elements. Once the clues are sorted, students begin to work on their hypothesis. 2. As students analyze the clues and arrive at a hypothesis, use guiding questions such as, “Tell me how the two things relate” and “What’s your reason for thinking that?” to keep students focused on solving the mystery. Avoid guiding them in a direction. The goal is for students to work with the clues and arrive at their own hypothesis. Students can use the Mystery Writing Guide Worksheet to record ideas. 3. In a whole group, have small groups share their hypotheses and evaluate them. Are they logical based on the clues? Do they make sense? Write group responses on the board so students can track their findings as they move through the evidence. The goal is to test each group hypothesis and arrive at the best conclusion. For example, if one group understands there is a connection between the mountain men and the beaver yet they also think the railroads had a role in the problem, do the clues support or refute these ideas? Remind students they are like historians looking at information to form a hypothesis, test it, and arrive at a conclusion.
Students are asked to think about the process of historical inquiry and how it relates to the steps they followed to arrive at a hypothesis
4. Assign each student a written reflection piece on the content learned and the process used to uncover the mystery. This is the most important part of the mystery strategy and should go beyond merely reporting content. Prompt students with questions such as: What happened in the activity? What things did you do well? Most importantly, ask, Which hypothesis best answers the mystery question? Why?
Common Pitfalls
- Data should tease the student without revealing too much.
- Data should hone inference skills.
- Clues should provide information not an explanation (see Mystery Strategy Clues Worksheet).
Example
Students are presented with the following problem: Why did the American beaver almost become extinct in 1840? Write the question on the board so it is visible throughout the activity. Anticipatory Set: Begin by employing a student’s knowledge of science and ecosystems learned earlier. Give a short presentation about the American Beaver. This would include the fact that beavers maintain dams that create ponds. The water level in these ponds is constant, encouraging the growth of vegetation that supports many other types of animals. The dams also keep summer rains and resulting erosion in check. The presentation could end with figures about the number of beavers estimated to be in North America from European settlement to today (see links below). Students would see a significant decline in the population during exploration and settlement. This decline leads students to the essential question and they can begin working with the clues to make hypotheses. Clues: Clues can be obtained from….
- images from fashion catalogs from the mid-1800s;
- real beaver pelt and/or beaver trap, scraps of commercial felt, or images of beaver fur and hats;
- short biographical sketches of mountain men such as Kit Carson, John Liver-Eating Johnston, and William Sublette;
- Advertisements for beaver products such as top hats and ads from trading companies seeking hunters. Scroll down through each page for the aforementioned images.
- newspaper accounts regarding skirmishes/battles between the Iroquois Confederation/other tribes in the Great Lakes region in the Beaver Wars;
- Quotes from all parties involved in the fur trade (Native American chiefs, trading company owners such as Manuel Lisa, mountain men, etc.)
- Pictures of people wearing beaver hats;
- John Jacob Astor.
Be sure to use some visuals! Reflection: Students reflect on the original question by presenting their hypotheses in written form. Along with their response about the disappearance of the beaver, students are asked to think about the process of historical inquiry and how it relates to the steps they followed to arrive at a hypothesis.
For more information
The Beaver Fur Hat. Mountain Men: Pathfinders of the West 1810-1860 Mountain Men and the Fur Trade The Fur Trade Osborne Russell and Aubrey L. Haines, Journal of a Trapper and Maps of His Travels in the Rocky Mountains Eric Jay Dolin Fur, Fortune and Empire: The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America Fred R. Gowans, Rocky Mountain Rendezvous: A History of the Fur Trade, 1825-1840 History Is Elementary
Bibliography
American Beavers. Silver, Harvey.F., et. al. Teaching styles & strategies. Trenton, NJ: The Thoughtful Education Press, 1996.
Building a Conversation between Textbooks, Students, and Teachers
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Why Do It?
One of my goals while teaching 11th grade U.S. History at a large urban high school in Oakland, CA, was to try and change the way students viewed our textbook and its role in our discussion of history. I wanted to move the textbook from it’s position as final word about an historical topic to a position as a “point-of-departure” for historical inquiry. My strategy was to ask students to read the text without having to answer any direct questions from the teacher or the textbook. Students generated questions for the text guided by a worksheet used throughout the year. My class was mixed in ability and ethnically diverse; I wanted to take advantage of this by making their different reactions to the reading a center of attention.
What Is It?
What Students Do Each time students read the textbook they worked on a core activity where they selected important people and events, generated questions about and reactions to the excerpt, and analyzed images in the text. They used questions from the Reading your Textbook worksheet to guide their responses. What the Teacher Does 1. Collect and read over the student responses to parts I, II, and III of the core activity. 2. Use student work to create a handout to be used in class on the next day. This handout listed:
- terms the students thought were important;
- questions they had; and
- examples of inquisitive and perceptive writing.
3. Answer student questions in subsequent lessons.
The questions they asked revealed their thinking, prior knowledge, and engagement with the topic.
When I looked at the individuals, events, terms, and illustrations the students chose to write about I was interested in what caught their attention, and how their reactions reflected key concepts necessary to the development of historical understanding: historical agency, historical empathy, and moral judgments. Example Consider these examples of questions that students generated in response to reading a textbook section on early Westward Expansion. 1. Why couldn't Supreme Court Justice John Marshall enforce his ruling? 2. Why did the Cherokees abandon their ideas and change their lifestyle? 3. Why were the settlers so inclined to leave where they were from? Did something happen to them? Why did they want to leave? 4. What was the American frontier? 5. The U.S. didn't want their land (or rights) taken by the British. They knew what it was like to be threatened. Why would they threaten someone else? 6. If the U.S. government took the time to protect the Native Americans in the Northwest Ordinance (1787) why didn't they follow through with it? Handout Prompts Discussion As I distributed the handout created from student responses, one student immediately wanted to talk about the question, "If the U.S. government took the time to protect the Native Americans in the Northwest Ordinance (1787) why didn't they follow through with it?" This was an excellent question because it focused on a number of issues connected to historical understanding: chronological thinking (questions of continuity and change), moral judgment, and historical empathy. Noting that the Northwest Ordinance was written in 1787 and the Cherokee removal was fifty years later, I asked, "What had changed during these fifty years that would help us explain this change in policy? Think about changes in national goals and changes in those who were making the laws and policies.” Often, it was the questions they asked that most revealed their thinking, prior knowledge, and engagement with the topic.
Why is This a Best Practice?
Student Questions “Open Up” the Textbook and Identify Historical Puzzles Questions students asked revealed their thinking about some aspect of the reading. They turned written factual material into a series of historical puzzles. How can people say one thing and do another? Why would people abandon their traditions and heritage?
Turn the textbook into a point of departure
These are questions that could only be answered with further study and discussion. At the very least these questions suggest an engagement in the material that would either be invisible or absent if the students were simply required to answer the textbook questions. Textbook questions often end discussion as they only ask students to identify information contained in the text. These types of questions don't lead students to believe there is more to know, nor do they suggest that there may be different ways to interpret the events and actions of individuals in the narrative. Student Questions Reveal How Students Read Students' questions often reflected their challenges, as readers, to glean information from the textbook. For example, the textbook does explain the American frontier. However, providing students space to write down questions to which they expect an answer reveals areas of difficulty they may be having with a text. Opening Up a Dialogue Students' questions often went beyond simply asking for factual knowledge. In other questions we can see the beginnings of a dialogue between the students, their textbook, and the teacher. These questions, originating from the students' reading of the textbook, turn the textbook into a point of departure, rather than the final word. Answering these questions requires engaging in historical inquiry and going beyond the information required in the text. Creating a Teacher and Student Active Classroom The students were actively involved in developing questions that pushed them beyond the limits of the text's narrative. Many wanted to know more and, as their questions revealed, they wondered about important historical issues, like freedom, justice, and equality. I took seriously the task of responding to them (when I returned student papers I responded in writing to particular questions on individual papers) and helping students find ways to respond. That I then took their questions and made them a focus of class discussion was a starting point for delving more deeply into the history we were studying, and continuing to build a classroom community. Indeed, I found that if students didn’t get responses to their questions they stopped asking. Through this approach, both teacher and students are actively involved in the lesson and the important work of moving from engagement with an historical question towards historical understanding.
Digitized Newspaper Archives
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Question
Some newspapers (The Piqua [Ohio] Daily Call, for example) have been digitized but charge quite a fee through the organization that provided that service. Is there any method for educators to access these without the fees?
Answer
No blanket method exists for researchers—whether they are educators or not—to access digitized newspaper archives for free. Digitizing or microfilming newspapers takes time and money, and unless an organization or company has received grant funding to do the work, it must find a way to pay for the expenditure. The National Digital Newspaper Program, begun jointly by the NEH, the Library of Congress, and various state-funded organizations has begun the huge task of digitizing U.S. newspapers published between 1836 and 1922, but the project is at a relatively early stage. The Library of Congress’ Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers website is still merely a sort of prototype, although some newspapers can be searched there. Finding the archives of each newspaper presents a unique case. For example, the entirely free online, searchable archives of The Brooklyn Daily Eagle—from 1841 to 1902—is available via the Brooklyn Public Library website. Some very large or historically significant newspapers, such as The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Liberator, and The Pennsylvania Gazette, have been digitized and access to them is available from commercial sources, such as ProQuest or Gale. College and university libraries often subscribe to various digitized series of newspaper and periodicals, and you could check with a local university library to see what they have. Typically, if you are not a student or a faculty member or staffer of the university or college, you will have to visit the library and search their online databases there. Larger public libraries sometimes also subscribe to such services and make them available online at the libraries themselves, free to those who use the workstations provided. Some large urban public libraries provide free access onsite to digitized archives of their own cities’ major newspapers. Some other commercial services that provide online access to digitized newspapers include NewspaperArchive.com and Ancestry.com. Public and college libraries often have microfilm copies of the archives of newspapers that are or have been published nearby. Regional historical societies or state libraries are other possible repositories for bound newspaper archives or microfilmed versions of them. In some cases, the microfilm might be available via Interlibrary Loan, but in other cases, researchers have to travel to the library to look at the microfilm (or the hard copy) there. In every case, before traveling to a library, researchers should call the library beforehand that (according to their catalog, online or otherwise) appears to have copies of the newspaper and have a librarian verify that the specific issues they wish to look at are indeed included among the issues that the library has. Some newspapers have digitized their archives—their “morgue files”—but only use the database they have created for their own research. Some others make some or all of their digitized archives available for a search fee. Calling the particular newspaper in which you are interested and pitching your case, explaining what you are looking for and how you would use the online access, might have some result, even if only having someone on staff at the paper search for a particular article or articles. Paying a small research fee for this is much cheaper and easier (depending on what you are looking for) than going through archives that consist of bound copies or microfilm. As for The Piqua Daily Call, the paper is still published and a free online searchable archive is available through its website back to 2001. A preliminary search of WorldCat (OCLC) and of the online catalogs of public and private libraries and historical societies in the region provides additional possibilities: The Edison Community College library in Piqua keeps a month’s current issues on hand. The Ohio Historical Society in Columbus has original scattered issues from 1886, 1892, 1896, 1905, 1914-1916, 1922-24, 1926-28, and from 1945-1956. It also has a microfilm copy of issues from 1914-1922. The library at Wright State University in Dayton has a microfilm copy of issues from 1946-1967. The Western Reserve Historical Society in Cleveland has some older scattered copies from 1884 through 1922. And the local history section of the Flesh Public Library in Piqua has a microform version of issues from 1883-1910 (with some gaps), and from 1968-1972.
For more information