4Real Forums: Teaching With Historic Places

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Across Time and Place
4Real Forums : Across Time and Place

Topic: Teaching With Historic Places

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MaryM
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Joined: Feb 11 2005
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Posted: Sept 15 2005 at 4:50pm \| IP Logged

I thought this really fits with the forum title "Blowing the Dust off History." Its a great way to look at history through the actual historic places (something I know you all do anyway).

There is a current thread in the Great Outdoors about National Parks (which also includes National Historic Sites) and it reminded me that I have been meaning to post a site which is part of the National Park Service. It's called Teaching with Historic Places. It gives great ideas for teaching linked to historic sites (includes many more than just NHS). You can search by
Location/State
Theme
Time period
National Standards for History

Lots of great info and lesson plans.

I'd love to hear your ideas for things you have done to incorporate historic sites into your history study (beyond the field trip).

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Mary M. in Denver

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momwise
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Joined: March 28 2005
Location: Colorado
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Posted: Sept 15 2005 at 9:47pm \| IP Logged

In the case of Mesa Verde, we're doing all the usual historical follow up stuff at home. We'll be narrating for our Book of Centuries, making coil pots and petroglyphs and reading library books. I did look up the lesson plans at the Mesa Verde site but didn't print them because they didn't seem that effective to me and I didn't want to be interrupting the kids in them middle of something they found interesting to ask them questions dreamed up by the curriculum people. I'll be interested in other posts on this topic. I've bookmarked your site in my travel folder.

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Gwen...wife for 30 years, mom of 7, grandma of 3.....
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Kelly
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Posted: Sept 19 2005 at 10:32pm \| IP Logged

Mary,
Thanks for the site. I downloaded some info for some nifty-sounding NHPs not far from here(one of which I had never even heard of!) and look forward to checking them out, info in hand.

Kelly in FL

PS I *did* notice the National Park Service's usual pro-British, anti-Spanish slant in the two lesson plans I perused. Sigh. Guess history will always have a slant, but I keep hoping for the day I'll visit a NHP and hear them say something,no... ANYTHING, good about the Spanish. In the meantime, I suppose it provides a vivid, "teachable moment" about how the winners write the history!

MaryM
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Joined: Feb 11 2005
Location: Colorado
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Posted: Oct 11 2005 at 2:14am \| IP Logged

This quote is from a message in the "US history 1900-present" thread that was going this summer. I had been meaning for some time to post our experience of teaching on this topic with a visit to a historic place & using the NPS website.

guitarnan wrote:

I'll add a suggestion to the WWII list...Farewell to Manzanar. I'm a California native and always thought people knew about the internment camps set up for Japanese immigrants and Japanese-Americans in WWII...guess I'm wrong...anyway, this book is sensitive and lyrical, and it's honest without much bitterness.

I, too, grew up aware of the internment camps so also take it for granted that everyone is familiar with this part of our history. One of the camps, Minidoka, was nearby in SE Idaho. My best friend in kindergarten was of Japanese-American heritage and her mother had been sent to a camp with her family when she was a young girl. And where my parents live now in Eastern Oregon is an area where many families settled after they were freed from the camps. This thread mentioned by Nancy, came up right before our trip to Idaho, Oregon, and California this summer so we did a little mini-unit on the history of the interment camps. There is a lot of information on this "Teaching with Historic Places" site -War Relocation Camps. My older boys had read Farewell to Manzanar and the Journal of Ben Uchida several years earlier.

I focused on telling the younger ones about this time and found these picture books on the subject. (Being big baseball fans, we had read Baseball Saved Us before)

Flags-set in California neighborhood where a Japanese-American lived
The Bracelet (set in Tanforan Evacuation Center heading to Topaz Camp in Utah)
Flowers from Mariko (set in Arizona � either Poston or more likely Gila River)
Baseball Saved Us (setting: most likely Minidoka in Idaho)
So Far From the Sea (setting: Manzanar in California)
Under One Flag (setting: Rohwer in Arkansas)
Blue Jay in the Desert - Marlene Shigekawa (setting: Poston Internment Camp in Arizona)

Then we took the side trip off I-80 to see what is left of Minidoka and read the historical markers there. What strikes an observer is how isolated the area still is to know that there was even less there in the 40s. It really was out in the middle of no-where in the high desert. We also went near the area of Tule Lake but didn�t have time to take a side trip there. I think it would be interesting to visit Manzanar. Another of the camps was in Colorado (Granada). We�ve not been as again it is in a very remote area of the state. All the camps were in mountain or desert communities in the west far from the ocean. What I hadn�t realized until visiting this site was that there were also 2 camps in Arkansas.

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Mary M. in Denver

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