Doing History on Day 1 of Class

By Jeff Burns

I wanted to do something a little different than just going over the syllabus on the first day of my history classes this year, so I decided to have them do some history on day 1. Inspired by one of the dozens of initiatives being introduced at my school this year, making connections and building relationships with students, I scoured my house and classroom looking for knickknacks, mementos, any little objects that were part of my story.  I ended up with business cards, expired passports, class rings, favorite books and CDs, and all kinds of other things.

Next, I divided the “artifacts” into 6 small baskets. Each group got a basket, and I instructed them to examine and discuss the objects and write down any observations they make based on the artifacts.

After several minutes of discussion, each group shared some of their observations, and I let them know if they were correct or not.  Then, I asked questions like “As we examine primary sources and artifacts this year, what are some problems that might affect our effort to get to the truth?” and “Who curated this collection? How does that affect the story told by the artifacts?”  I then asked questions spiraling off their answers.  This led to a great discussion of context, perspectives, bias, and the interpretation of history. I then wrapped it up with a brief PowerPoint about me and my hobbies that filled in some of the holes left by the artifact handling.

It was a fun activity, enjoyed by all.  The students interacted with each other and learned a little about me, and I learned about them.  It also introduced the idea of “doing history. 

History Teacher or Hoarder?

By Jeff Burns

The picture above is not a picture of my classroom or my garage; this room is much better organized.  I’m a history teacher.  Sometimes I wonder of that just means I’m a hoarder. I love old stuff, things, junk, objects – or maybe artifacts sound better – and I love using them in my history classes.  Holding, using, and discussing these artifacts brings history to life for my students.

This is real hands on history, and the use of objects can not only enhance your students’ learning, but it can also allow you to check off a lot of the pedagogical demands made on teachers today.    Hands on history promotes:

 

•      Movement

•      Discussion
•      Thought
•      Engagement
•      Understanding
•      Multiple intelligences
•      Personalization
•      Differentiation
•      Interaction
•      Grouping

Objects can be used singly, in groups, or in themed collections like traveling trunks, in a variety of ways:

•      As a hook to generate interest

•      To start discussion
•      To supplement instruction
•      In learning stations
•      In museum/gallery walks

But most importantly, objects reinforce the purpose of history; they tell the story. 

The Histocrats have previously blogged about traveling trunks.  We were introduced to the idea through participating in several Teaching American History Grants in which we created our own trunks.  A traveling trunk is a collection of primary and secondary sources related to a theme a topic; they may contain documents, objects, artworks, even videotapes.  While it’s relatively easy to create your own trunk, many museums and institutions offer trunks that teachers can borrow for free or rent, and they can often be shipped anywhere in the country.  To find sources, check with a particular institution or simply search for “traveling trunks.”

My artifacts come from a lot of different places.  The contents of my first trunk, pictured above, came from pre-packaged kits sold by Colonial Williamsburg, supplemented with a few items that I either made or found elsewhere.  The trunk is about colonial life and the objects are sample belongings of a colonial militiaman, woman, slave, and Native American.

Some objects are family artifacts like photos, my grandfathers’ World War I draft registrations (copied at the National Archives – Atlanta where all WWI draft registration cards are stored), my great grandmother’s cast iron  iron and 100+ year old scissors for example.  I’ve purchased some things in antique shops, flea markets, and on Ebay. On a trip to New England, I discovered sealed bottles of various medicines sold in the late 1800s, with the medicine intact, and magazines dating from the 1880s and 1910s and 1920s.  (Because I was flying and because I didn’t want century old medicine sitting around my classroom, I poured out the original contents and replaced it with colored water.)  On Ebay, I’ve found models of various forms of transportation, reproduction catalogs, and an authentic stereopticon with cards (home entertainment device of the 1800s which enabled people to see 3D images).

In other blogs, I wrote about using museums-in-a-book and museum boxes, packaged collections of reproduced documents.  I laminate and use these documents in my collections.

Depending on my objectives, students may engage in one or more of several activities while examining the objects:

•      Take Notes
•      Discuss
•      Answer Specific Questions
•      Create Graphic Organizers
•      Make Connections
•      Analyze
•      Categorize/Group
•      Speculate
•      Make Predictions

 

After the hands-on activity is completed, what do you do with the experience?  It is essential to debrief in some fashion, formally or informally.  There are many summative assessments that you might employ:

•      Use evidence to write an essay

•      Develop a character and write a letter, journal entry
•      Create a poem, story, dialogue, skit, or other document
•      Create a character sketch, a biography, a résumé

And if you’re looking for a project, have students create their own groups of objects as a trunk or exhibit, to explore some topic of family, local, state, American, or world history.

So, don’t be afraid to bring back Show & Tell to your classroom! 

Museums that Educators Love: Mystic Seaport

            Are you looking for unique materials and sources to bring to your classroom? Do you want your students to use artifacts to explore history?   We are always on the lookout a great museum to connect to our classrooms. Mystic Seaport, The Museum of America and the Sea is a museum where you can make a great classroom connection.

Why would an Educator want to visit Mystic Seaport?

Located in Mystic, Connecticut, Mystic Seaport tells the story of America and the Sea. The history of life in the United States is the tale of the relationship between man and the water. “If you or your ancestors traveled here anytime between the melting of the ice bridge and about 1960, you came by water,” John Boudreau, a member of the Museum’s Education Department said. “Put simply, the story of America is the story of America and the Sea. They’re inseparable.”

  Mystic Seaport uses a variety of experiences and programs to share its collection of more than a million artifacts with the public.  In Mystic, the history of America and the sea is an adventure.  Mystic Seaport has combined preservation, and unique experiences to share their collection with you.

How can you connect with Mystic Seaport?

            Mystic Seaports uses both traditional program and virtual programing to connect with the Educators. Traditional methods include visits, in-school programs and field trips is you are in the vicinity. 

Virtual programming includes a robust website with online collections and options for a virtual visit.  Mystic Seaport for Educators, is a dynamic and accessible website for Educators. Artifacts and documents, and maps have from the Museum’s collection have been digitized and enhanced with audio recordings, transcripts, and interactive features to create engaging opportunities for the study of history, making them appropriate resources for Educators to use themselves, or as a great base of primary sources for students The resources cover everything from whaling to immigration, and new content is added every year, making it an ever-expanding resource!

 The Museum also offers Virtual Education Programs, which are the next step in connecting with the collections at Mystic Seaport. The museum uses Skype and state-of-the-art technology in their own production studio to showcase artifacts in the collection and discuss what it means to be a curator with schools across the country, from Minnesota to the Northeast. “It’s a pretty incredible set-up,” Boudreau said. “We have a green screen and multiple cameras, which allows us to examine artifacts in detail with students. In a lot of cases, they can get closer to the artifacts with a virtual program than they could in person!”

   Virtual Education Programs can be tailored to fit your curriculum, and offer plenty of opportunities for working with primary sources, making abstract history suddenly very tangible. It’s also a great opportunity to learn about how and why museums preserve the past. For more information about the Virtual Education Programs, visit http://www.mysticseaport.org/learn/k-12-programs/virtual-programs .

What the Histocrats love about Mystic Seaport?

Mystic Seaport is an institution already making strong connections with Educators. The Mystic Seaport Education Community is a robust that includes educators, families and students. They have ongoing collaboration with educators that they openly share.  Community members are involved in Mystic Seaport projects. It is exciting to see collaboration among both groups.  The Mystic Seaport for Educators Summer Fellowship even allows educators to come work at the Museum for a week during the summer on a research project for the website. The Fellowship includes behind-the-scenes access to the Museum, an opportunity to work with artifacts first-hand, and even a field trip! (Email john.boudreau@mysticseaport.org for details.) This is a superb example of how museums and educators can support each other in engaging the public in the study of the past.

Gilded Age Christmas (or any time of year) Shopping

By Jeff Burns

The Gilded Age transformed America like few other periods in American history.  Industrialization made individuals into billionaires, often more powerful than the government, giant corporations were born, and inventors made huge technological advances.  The United States became a major world economic power.  For the first time, more Americans lived in cities than in rural areas and worked at non-agricultural jobs.  Millions of new immigrants arrived, enriching the American culture and becoming Americanized simultaneously.   Progressive reformers and cities began making changes to improve urban living and working conditions. 

For years now, I have taken my students shopping, without leaving the classroom,  in order to get them to see and understand these changes.  First, we talk about the rise of department stores, a new concept for urban shoppers.  Then, we shop from mail order catalogs, one of the new developments of the Gilded Age.  Pioneers like JC Penny, Montgomery Ward, and Sears & Roebuck developed catalogs in order to reach the still large rural population, unable to shop in department stores.  I relate how valuable catalogs were for rural Americans, using my grandmother’s family as a n example.  Small farmers in South Georgia, they might have made it into a general store once a week or less, as late as the 1930s and 1940s. As a child growing up myself in a small town with few shopping options, my family relied heavily on the Sears catalog and catalog distribution store in town.  Santa Claus was for me at least pretty much a Sears employee.

For this activity, I have acquired a number of reproductions of old catalogs from the 1880s.  You can find them pretty readily, new and used.  I copied a number of pages from them and divided them into five categories:  health and beauty, recreation, household, men’s fashion, and women’s fashion.  I divide the class into 5 groups, and they rotate through each group in the course of the activity.  For each category, I give them a few questions to guide their small group discussion and encourage them to look at and talk about every page, discussing things like: What’s familiar and unfamiliar?  What would use and not use? Etc.  The health and beauty category always draws a lot of attention and discussion because of the cure-all products and things like electric belts.

Because my school year starts in early August, it’s perfect timing for me to make it a Christmas shopping activity.  (But it can be done at any time of the year.)  I might give them a $25 or $30 shopping budget to buy gifts or tell them to make a wish-list for Santa from the catalog pages.  One question that always comes up is how much are those prices now. While it’s not perfect, I find it an easy rule of thumb to tell them to multiply by 20.

 After all the groups have seen everything, it’s time to debrief. We have interesting discussions about what these products can tell us about everyday life and about the roles of men and women, what did people do in their leisure time for fun, what medical issues were people concerned about and what was the state of healthcare.  They see the effects of mass production and how catalogs and the shared shopping experience homogenized American culture and helped Americanize new immigrants.  It’s always a fun and enlightening day or two in class.

Document Box Fun

By Jeff Burns

Of course, I love book stores, new or used.  Barnes & Noble, and other chains, often have great “Bargain Book” aisles in which I can spend lots of time, often finding great materials that I can use in my history classroom.  It was there that I was introduced to various historical collections created by Chronicle Books.  Their products  are also available in many museum gift shops and online. Chronicle publishes creative journals, notecards and stationery, and books.  They also published boxed collections of reproductions of primary documents relating to particular topics.  Unfortunately, it seems that these items may not be available through the website anymore, but they may be found elsewhere.


The boxes themselves are beautifully designed, conversation starters on a table or shelf.  The Ellis Island box for example is made to resemble a piece of luggage, and the Titanic box is designed to look like a steamer trunk, complete with a lift-out inner tray.  Inside each box is a treasure trove of primary documents, carefully archived and explained in the accompanying booklet, in order to present a detailed view of the topic.  In Ellis Island, for example, you find reproductions of postcards, shipping line advertisements, letters from and to immigrants, letters of naturalization, photographs, inspection cards, etc.  In Titanic, there are copies of menus, postcards, ship diagrams, and other documents.   Each document is transcribed and described in the accompanying manual.


For classroom use, I usually laminate the documents for durability.  Then, students can practice interpreting the primary sources.  In reading the documents, students learn important critical reading and interpretation skills, and they gain a deeper understanding and appreciation of the time.     Students might be asked to arrange or group the documents in order to create a particular project or address a particular question.  Documents can be distributed to students who are assigned to create a character or situation based on their assigned document, or the students might be required to use the assigned document as a starting point for a research project.  The accurate reproduction details provide a high level of verisimilitude, making students think and feel like historians.  I also use the documents for bulletin board displays and teaching trunks.  Beyond the classroom, they provide hours of entertainment for history buffs.

If you can find these great resources, I hope you check them out.  If you know of other similar products, please comment below.

Create Your Own Traveling Teaching Trunks

Select Artifacts

By Nina Kendall

Looking for a new activity for you class? Try a traveling trunk. A “traveling trunk” is a collection of artifacts and sources that can be used to teach others about history.  Students examine artifacts and investigate collections to better understand an event or a historical period. The 'trunk” or collection comes to your classroom when you can’t make it to a museum or historic site.  Many museums or historic site have trunks they will lend for a small fee. Of course, you can make your own traveling trunk as well.

The Histocrats did. We all have and use trunks to teach. Whether we teach elementary school or high school, we use them in class. From colonial hornbooks to railroad ties, we each have a unique collection of objects to teach with in our classrooms.  Our trunks reflect similar themes but different approaches to teaching.  When you make it yourself, you can customize it to your curriculum and student population. We encourage you to pick a topic and create a trunk of your own.    

Now you might be thinking high school students don’t want to work with artifacts. You would be wrong. I have had students argue over who gets to work with various artifacts. In fact, I would make the argument that the secondary level is a great age to use artifacts. Traditional activities put activities like “show and tell’ and field trips in elementary school, when you are learning to be careful, observant, and cautious when handling materials. Yet secondary students who have mastered all these skill rarely get an opportunity to handle and examine objects or go on field trips. Traveling trunks bridge the gap by putting artifacts and other objects in the hands of those prepared to handle them.

Are you ready to try making a trunk of your own? Try these tips to help you get started.

·         Select the topic you want to build your trunk around. Think about what unit you would like to your students to participate in as more engaged learners.

·         Think about objects that would help you teach this unit and how you would use them.  Ten objects would allow for the creation of small groups in any classroom.

o   Do you want all the objects to be the same?

o   Do you want students work with several different objects?

·         Establish a budget for yourself in collecting your objects. Set aside a small part of organizing and storing your objects.

Traveling Trunk

·         Brainstorm where you might find your objects. Be creative. You may find some at home or may be free items that are recycled or found in nature.. Others objects may be found in souvenir or gift shops on your travels.

·         Organize, inventory, and label your collection. You will need a way to monitor your collection.

o   What will you story your collection in? Anything can work. We have seen people use trunks, baskets, and old suitcases.

o   How will you pass items out? A collection of small items could be stored in individual plastic bags.

You are now well on your way to creating your first traveling trunk. We hope you enjoy your trunk as much as we do our trunks. Share your success stories and pictures of your trunks @Histocrats. Happy Teaching!