|
Pre-Reading
Activities
Plot
each of the titles in this unit on a timeline, ranging from
the early 1800s to 1912. Discuss with students, in general terms,
how these periods differ with respect to technology, travel,
lifestyle, and government. Ask your students to share their
perceptions of Native Americans, cowboys, the Civil War, and
the sinking of the Titanic, based on books they’ve read and
movies they’ve seen. Introduce the concept of - stereotype,-
asking students to reflect on how different peoples and places
may be depicted in less than accurate terms.
Classroom
Connections
Activities
for use with
Thanksgiving
on Thursday
A
Thanksgiving CORNucopia
- Science
- Math
Jack and Annie learn quickly that
the first year the Pilgrims spent in America was difficult
and harsh. The wheat they had brought to plant would not
grow well in the rocky soil. They might have starved if
Squanto had not taught them how to cultivate corn. A staple
in the diet of Squanto's tribe, the Wampanoag, corn was
grown in different varieties-white, yellow, and red-and
was eaten at every meal.
With a few simple
materials and steps, your class can enjoy planting and observing
tiny corn crops of their own!
Materials:
-1 clear plastic cup per student
- 4 corn kernels, of one or more varieties, per student
- Potting soil
Procedures:
- Fill the cup halfway to top with soil.
- Use a pencil to poke holes near the sides of the cup.
- Place one corn kernel in each hole and cover with soil.
- Water until soil is moist.
- Place cup in full sunlight, keeping soil moist, not soggy.
Have students
keep an Observation Log in which they measure growth and
describe color and appearance of corn seedlings on a weekly
basis for four weeks. When plants reach six inches in height,
they can be transplanted.
Ground corn meal
was used to make many dishes, including the delicious corn
pudding Jack and Annie enjoy as part of the First Thanksgiving
feast. Use the following recipe to prepare corn pudding
with your students. Gather all necessary ingredients and
tools for volume measurement (cups, tablespoons, teaspoons),
emphasizing the importance of precise measurements. Have
them predict what would happen if they used too much milk
or not enough molasses.
Ingredients:
- 2 tablespoons butter
- 3 cups milk
- 1/3 cup molasses
- 1/3 cup cornmeal
- 1 egg
- 1/2 teaspoon cinnamon
- 1/2 teaspoon ginger
- 1/4 teaspoon salt
Procedures:
- Preheat oven to 300 degrees.
- Grease bottom and sides of a baking dish with 1 tablespoon
of butter.
- Combine milk and molasses in saucepan. Gradually stir
in cornmeal.
- Cook and stir over medium heat until mixture thickens,
approximately 10 minutes.
- Remove from heat and stir in remaining tablespoon of butter.
- Beat egg together with cinnamon, ginger, and salt in a
small mixing bowl.
- Gradually add egg mixture to hot cornmeal.
- Pour in greased baking dish and bake, uncovered, for 1-1/2
hours or until pudding has thickened.
- Serve while still warm . . . mmmm!
Walk Around
in Someone's Moccasins
- History
- Language Arts
Many of our books that describe
America's first Thanksgiving do so from the point of view
of the Pilgrims who had left Europe to escape religious
persecution and to make a new home. But what about those
peoples for whom America was already home?
Discuss with students
the different ways in which the - magic of the Wampanoag
community- benefited the fledgling Pilgrim community in
Plymouth and has continued to benefit modern America today.
Provide resources
(books, Internet sites, etc.) and ask students to briefly
investigate one of the following questions on the Wampanoag
and to report back to the class:
- How did they
dress? (Men wore breechclouts or leggings, and women wore
skirts made of deerskin. Deerskin moccasins were worn by
all.)
- What kinds of homes did they live in? (Wigwams)
- What foods did they grow? (Corn, beans, squashes, pumpkin)
- What animals did they hunt? (Deer, bear, beaver ,rabbits,
turtle, fish, crabs)
- How did they show respect to the animals they hunted?
(They asked the animal forgiveness before killing it and
left behind some bones or meat as a spiritual offering to
help other animals survive.)
- What different - thanksgiving- festivals did they celebrate
each year?
(Maple Dance, Planting Feast, Strawberry Festival, Green
Corn Festival, Harvest Festival, Mid-Winter Festival)
Have students
write an essay in which they view the first Thanksgiving
through the eyes of a young Wampanoag boy or girl. What
are their impressions about these newcomers to their land?
Are they excited? Fearful? Angry? Do they perceive the Pilgrims
as friends or enemies? What differences/similarities between
the Pilgrim community and their own strike them in particular?
How do they feel about helping the Pilgrims survive in their
new home? How do they feel about this celebration?
 Check
out A Thanksgiving Quilt
Certificate
of Achievement
Teaching
ideas by Rosemary B. Stimola, Ph.D., professor of children's
literature at City University of New York, and educational and
editorial consultant to publishers of children's books.
Activities
for use with
Civil
War on Sunday
Letter from a Drummer Boy
- History
- Language Arts
During the Civil
War, the beat of the drummer boy’s drum was used to give
orders to soldiers and to help find one another on smoky
battlefields. It told them when to eat, how to march, and
how to fight. Have students imagine being a 15-year-old
drummer boy, Union or Confederate, who’s been wounded and
brought to Clara Barton’s field hospital to recover. Have
them write letters to their parents in which they express
their recollections and relationships of the battlefield.
They may write of how their ideas and feelings about war
have changed since becoming soldiers and their families
what they miss about home and being with them. Finally,
have them tell how they feel about going back to fight,
what they hope will happen, and what they would like their
families to know.
Check out Wartime
Woes
Teaching ideas
by Rosemary B. Stimola, Ph.D., professor of children's literature
at City University of New York, and educational and editorial
consultant to publishers of children's books.
Activities
for use with
Buffalo Before Breakfast
Cowboys
and - Indians-
- History
- Art
The stereotypic
views of cowboys and - Indians- in many Hollywood movies
and on television were greatly influenced by images found
in the paintings and sculpture of 19th-century
American artists. Using library and Internet resources,
share selected artworks of Frederic Remington, N. C. Wyeth,
and George Catlin. Provide your students with biographical
information placing these artists in historical/personal
contexts. Discuss techniques the artists used to represent
the Old West and aspects of cowboy and - Indian- character
and lifestyle. Have students respond by writing brief descriptions
of cowboys and - Indians- as portrayed in these artworks
and how these images are exaggerated or distorted, based
on their knowledge of cowboys and Native Americans gleaned
from other sources.
Check
out Lakota
Tepee to draw and decorate your own tepee.
Teaching ideas
by Rosemary B. Stimola, Ph.D., professor of children's literature
at City University of New York, and educational and editorial
consultant to publishers of children's books.
Activities
for use with
Titanic:
A
Nonfiction Comanion to Tonight on the Titanic
Getting Started
A Big Name
Write the word Titanic on the chalkboard, and ask
students to look it up in the dictionary and jot down the different
meanings in their notebooks. Titanic means "huge and
powerful" and in Greek mythology, the Titans were a race of
giants. Ask students what they know about the Titanic
ship that set sail in 1912. Discuss why the ship was named Titanic
? Share with the class that the ship was the biggest in
the world . . . as long as three football fields, as tall as
an 11-story building, with room for 2,500+ passengers.
Have your students take
a peek at the Titanic Geography (pp.68-69) and the
Titanic Timetable (pp.102-103) to get a sense of time
and place before they begin reading and discovering.
Go Figure
Ticket prices ranged from $35 for a third-class room to $3,300
for the finest first class room. Discuss the idea that the price
of a ticket reflects the services/amenities that the different
passengers received. Jack points out that in 1912, $400 was
worth more than $5,000 in today's money (p.31). Discuss the
idea of inflation-the general and progressive increase in prices
over time-with your class. For homework, have students sit down
with their parents and ask them what the prices of certain items
(i.e., eggs, winter coat, airplane tickets, and cars) were during
their childhood. As a class, make a chart comparing these prices
with today's prices for the same items.
Ahoy Mates!
On pages 30-33, Jack and Annie describe the different types
of rooms on the Titanic and share pictures
that they have found in their research. Divide your students
into groups of four, and have each group design a modern brochure
for the Titanic with a catchy introduction, a list
of features, room rates, etc. They should also draw pictures
or print out photographs from the Internet to jazz up the brochure.
Provide students with brochures of current cruises or print
out information from cruise websites (i.e, www.disneycruise.com)
that they can use for ideas.
Hull'rific
News
Many reporters were on hand when the Titanic survivors
arrived in New York. Some stories were chilling and some were
heart wrenching. Have students write headliners for the sinking
of the ship. They can become news writers and depict what happened
on April 14, 1912. The articles should include the passenger's
name, class rank, where he/she was at the time they heard the
news of the iceberg, and the details of his/her survival. Conduct
a class newscast where students can report their stories.
How Do You Rank?
- Social Studies
- Language Arts
There were three distinct classes aboard the Titanic .
Passengers were treated differently based on their economic
standings, and the ship was designed to accommodate the differences.
Have students randomly select a class rank, and have them choose
to be a child, man, woman, steerage, crew or captain of the
ship.
Each student should write a first-person descriptive account
in journal format of their character's experience sailing on
the ship. Students may want to write about how they got their
ticket on the biggest ship in the world, their expectations,
how they were treated by the crew and other passengers, the
first few days aboard the floating palace, the terror of hitting
the iceberg. Your class may want to refer to this website of
Titanic passengers and crew: www.Titanic-online.com.
Can You Read
Me Now?
Samuel F.B. Morse invented a system of dots and dashes to represent
letters. The code, shown below, has been modified and used internationally
to send messages by telegraph. Have student write distress codes
to each other. They can also create their own system of symbols
and patterns to write messages, and then have their peers try
to decode!
| a |
• - |
j |
• - - - |
s |
• • • |
| b |
- • • • |
k |
- • - |
t |
- |
| c |
- • - • |
l |
• - • • |
u |
• • - |
| d |
- • • |
m |
- - |
v |
• • • - |
| e |
• |
n |
- • |
w |
• - - |
| f |
• • - • |
o |
- - - |
x |
- • • - |
| g |
- - • |
p |
• - - • |
y |
- • - - |
| h |
• • • • |
q |
- - • - |
z |
- - • • |
| i |
• • |
r |
• - • |
|
|
Learning from
the Past
Numerous missions have tried unsuccessfully to raise the Titanic;
however historians have spent years studying the ship underwater
as well as the artifacts that have been salvaged. Have students
study the research guide, library books, and websites for pictures
of the Titanic as it was in 1912, as well as the pictures of
how it looks today.
Certain research expeditions
took away objects from the Titanic wreckage. Many people were
upset because they think of the site as a memorial to those
who lost their lives. Ask students for their opinions on this
matter.
The Tip of
the Iceberg
Ask students if they've heard the expression, "It's just the
tip of the iceberg." Discuss the meaning of this expression,
and the fact that icebergs are 90% below the surface. As a class,
reread Jack and Annie's "All About Icebergs" on pages 60-61.
Have students visit the Oceanworld website at http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/students/iceberg/index.html
and record interesting facts in their notebooks.
Check out IT'S
A FACT, JACK to help your students differentiate between
fact and fiction.
Teaching ideas provided by Jamay Johnson, second grade teacher,
and Melinda Murphy, media specialist, Reed Elementary School,
Cypress Fairbranks Independent School District, Houston, Texas.
Activities
for use with
Tonight
on the Titanic
Passenger Interview
- History
- Drama
The men, women,
and children who survived the sinking of the Titanic might
easily have different recollections of April 14, 1912. Have
students use factual information in Tonight on the Titanic
and in other library and Internet resources to prepare to
question – and to be questioned – survivors from the crew,
first class, and - steerage- about how they came to be on
this - unsinkable ship,- and with whom they were traveling
and how they felt on that fateful night. Students may then
role-play interviewer/passenger pairs, eliciting various
first-person accounts and perspectives on this great tragedy.
Check out Save
Our Ship! and decipher a morse code message.
Answer to Save Our
Ship:
WATCH OUT FOR ICEBERGS
Teaching ideas
by Rosemary B. Stimola, Ph.D., professor of children's literature
at City University of New York, and educational and editorial
consultant to publishers of children's books.
Activities
for use with Ghost
Town at Sundown
Cowboy Sing-along
- History
- Music
Just like Slim,
Jack and Annie, many cowboys slept out under the stars,
cooked meals over a fire and sang traditional cowboy songs
like - Red River Valley- and - Home, Home on the Range.-
Here is the text of another song from the Old West. Ask
students how nighttime on a cattle drive is similar to /different
from nighttime on a mustang drive.
Cowboy
Lullaby
Desert silver
blue beneath the pale moonlight,
Coyote yappin’ lazy on the hill,
Starlight streams above us in the old firelight.
Time for millin’ cattle to be still.
(Chorus)
So now the lightning’s far away;
The coyote’s nothin’ skeery, just singin’ to her dearie.
Yah ho, tomorr’s another day,
So settle down, ye cattle, till the morning.
Nothin’ here that seems to be what you folks need,
Nothin’ there that seems to take your eye.
Still you got to watch them or they’ll all stampede.
Plungin’ down some ‘rroyo bank to die.
(Chorus)
So now the lightning’s far away;
The coyote’s nothin’ skeery, just singin’ to her dearie.
Yah ho, tomorr’s another day,
So settle down, ye cattle, till the morning.
Check out Ghost
Town Jeopardy
Answers
to Ghost Town Jeopardy
What is a stagecoach?
What is a player piano?
What were mustangs?
Who were rustlers?
What was Giddy-up?
What was a canyon?
What was a canteen?
What were tumbleweeds?
What was a rattlesnake?
Where was the General Store?
Teaching ideas
by Rosemary B. Stimola, Ph.D., professor of children's literature
at City University of New York, and educational and editorial
consultant to publishers of children's books.
*
All activities require Adobe
Acrobat
|
