Page 145 - Powerful Social Studies for Elementary Students 4th Edition

Teaching With Artifacts and Historical Source Material
Today’s teachers have access to a wonderful range of artifacts and documents that can enrich their students’ history learning. Materials packets, CD ROMs, and software collec- tions of primary sources are available for purchase. Many historical societies, archival collections, and museums have digitized their collections and made them available through the Internet, often with plans for documents-based lessons (Causey & Armento, 2001). In addition, the November/December, 2003 issue of Social Education (Volume 67, No. 7) was devoted entirely to teaching history with primary sources. Its articles contain guidance on finding and evaluating such sources and planning lessons around them. The sources range from old objects found in the home to gravestones in local cemeteries to reproductions of our national documents accessed via the Internet.
Teaching ideas and even full-fledged lesson plans can be found on Internet sites devoted to history or social studies teaching (e.g., teachinghistory.org) and in the jour- nals Social Education, Social Studies and the Young Learner, and The Social Studies. For example, Barton (2001) offered guidelines for scaffolding elementary students’ analyses of historical photographs. Using as examples several photos of food stores, restaurants, and gas stations taken in the 1940s, Barton explained the value of posing questions about the pictures (e.g., In what year might they have been taken? At what time of day? What are the people doing?), eliciting responses and supportive reasoning and then discussing the diverse opinions expressed to see if agreement might be reached. If the students have difficulty at first, the teacher can model some pertinent opinions and supportive observations, then cue students’ observations by asking questions such as “What do you think stores were like then?” or “Do you think advertising was important then?”
As another example, Wyman (1998) described activities built around excerpts from diaries written by children and adolescents whose families were migrating west along the Oregon Trail in the middle of the nineteenth century. The excerpts communicate the sights, sounds, and feelings experienced by these young people as they traveled west- ward. Wyman suggested three ways in which they can be incorporated into useful learn- ing activities: identifying and discussing unexpected content; identifying and discussing the implications of recurring events such as accidents, lost children, and contact with Indians; and having students imagine that their families were traveling westward along the Oregon Trail and creating their own imaginary diaries.
Sometimes a historical resource is not well suited to whole-class lessons but is useful as a focal point for activities in learning centers. Haas (2000) described such a use for A Street through Time (Millard, 1998), a richly illustrated children’s book that offers “a 12,000-year walk through history.” The book shows how a single place (a riverside street in Europe) changed through the centuries in response to innovations in culture and tech- nology. Each illustration depicts the everyday activities of people of a variety of ages and occupations. Close study of each individual illustration reveals a great deal of information about life during the century it portrays, and comparisons across illustrations develop appreciation for changes over time. Haas explained how individuals, pairs, or small groups of students can study and discuss these illustrations, guided by questions calling for them to note the clothing, activities, or artifacts being used by different people for different purposes, the similarities and differences between consecutive illustrations, and so on.
Along with the sources cited previously, you may wish to consult the following for more ideas about teaching history to elementary students. First, you may wish to subscribe to or inspect issues of Cobblestone: A History Magazine for Young People. Designed for
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CHAPTER 5 How Can I Teach History Powerfully? 117