Read All About It!

Submitted by:Nancy B. Plaxico
School or Affiliation: Ben Eielson Jr/Sr High School, Fairbanks, AK
Endorsed by: These lesson plans are the result of the work of the teachers who have attended the Columbia Education Center's Summer Workshop. CEC is a consortium of teacher from 14 western states dedicated to improving the quality of education in the rural, western, United States, and particularly the quality of math and science Education. CEC uses Big Sky Telegraph as the hub of their telecommunications network that allows the participating teachers to stay in contact with their trainers and peers that they have met at the Workshops.

Date: May 1994

Description: This activity can be adapted to any age group and can be a class research project or a homework project. It makes the study of history more fun.

Grade Level: Appropriate for grades 5-12.

Goal: Students often dislike history because they do not see it as relevant to their lives or necessary to know. This activity personalizes history for them.

Objectives:

Students will construct a newspaper that describes local, state, national and international events on the day they were born.

Materials: All resources are available in most libraries.

Procedure:

Students will write one editorial concerning an event of their birth year.

Students will research an issue and find a political cartoon on that issue and include it in the newspaper.

Students will construct a visual from their birth year. This can be a drawing, a poster, etc. (You may choose to allow them to make a tape of music that was popular during that year.

Students will interview a person concerning the year they (the student) were born. Students must prepare the questions in advance and write out the answers or use a tape recorder for oral history.

(Allow students class time to "show off" their work.)

Tying it All Together:

My students enjoy this activity. It gives them a sense of perspective and identifies this place in history. Since most students in the same grade were born about the same year, an in depth study of a single year shows how history must be condensed in history books.

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