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Lesson Plan Personal Stories and Primary Sources: Conversations with Elders - Unit Five

Teachers

Learning history from real people involved in real events brings life to history. This project provides a means to learn about the twentieth century from real people and primary sources. A 1913 newspaper provides a view of the world on the brink of a World War. An interview with a grandparent or significant elder provides a human face for life in the twentieth century. Through researching primary and secondary sources, students become conversant with significant aspects of twentieth century history.

Lesson Units

Objectives

Students will learn:

  • that each person contributes to the world's story;
  • how to differentiate between primary and secondary sources and how to assess the relative importance of each in the study of history;
  • how to access, interpret, analyze, and evaluate primary sources of various kinds;
  • how to conduct an interview;
  • effective use of questions in doing research;
  • techniques and skills of research;
  • the importance of accuracy and honesty in research;
  • how to "write history" clearly so that it communicates to others;
  • how to teach others the topic on which one has become an expert; and
  • techniques for effective oral presentations

Unit 5: Creating Timelines

Students learn how to compile and organize information, develop and present timelines.

Lesson Preparation

Resources

  • List of research topics from Unit Four.

Lesson Procedure

Students learn how to compile and organize information, develop and present timelines.

  1. Have the class compile a list of all of the research topics examined.
  2. Students brainstorm the themes that unite several of the projects. For example, films of the 1920s, musical films of the 1930s, women and the blues, swing dance, and vaudeville all fit the theme of entertainment. The topics of doctors in World War I, army nurses, the polio scare, and women nurses in the early 1900s, would fit a theme of health and medicine. Other possible themes might be sports, domestic life in the 1940s, World War II, transportation, or scientific advances.
  3. Students with topics united by a common theme form groups and share their information.
  4. Each student group creates a timeline including important events in their lives and the lives of their grandparents/elders, as well as important events and people of the period.
  5. Sources of all images should be included. Add the citation to the timeline when the image is found to avoid the difficulty of relocating the citation information at a later time.
  6. Share the completed timelines with the class. Another idea is to invite those interviewed to share the results of the project.

Extension

The lesson may be further extended by creating a class archive of transcripts, history research papers, and visuals. For example, students may:

  1. Create a file or a Web site of the interview transcripts.
  2. Photograph the posters or models created by students as visuals for the oral presentations and add them to the archive.
  3. Use a digital camera or scan photographs of the visuals, and add them to the archive.
  4. Prepare a presentation or display for "Grandparents' Day," in your school, using the archive of transcripts, history research papers, and visuals.

Lesson Evaluation

Students create timelines on a common topic including important events in the lives of the people interviewed and in their own lives, as well as important events and people from the research projects. A timeline index page with links to the theme timelines should unite the timelines created by the class groups.

Credits

Deborah Dent-Samake and Carolyn Karis, American Memory Fellows, 1998