Mining Childhood Lesson Plans

Offering a child-centric view is one way to make history more real to students. Our newest resource will help you do just that.

Published by the Montana Historical Society Press, Mining Childhood: Growing Up in Butte, Montana, 1900-1960 offers a child’s-eye view of the Richest Hill on Earth. The book's premise is that children were keen observers and active participants in community life, and childhood accounts of work, play, family, schooling, ethnicity, and neighborhood life offer fresh perspectives on Butte.

We've posted five excerpts (ranging from 5 to 45 pages) as PDFS for free download.

• “Coming of Age in Wartime,” in “Chapter 1, Children of the Hill,” 50-55.
• “Chapter 2, Mining Childhood,” 64-110.
• “Chapter 4, Child’s Play: Risk and Resilience,” 135-77.
• "Historical Perspective" and "Newsboys" in “Chapter 6, Learning to Labor," 218-27.
• “Chapter 7, Memories of a McQueen Childhood,”  249-77.

We've also posted six Common Core aligned lesson plans, five of which were written by 2014 Montana Teacher of the Year Anna Baldwin and include reading strategies that you might want to adapt for use with other complex texts. We thought the reading strategies she used in her fourth grade lesson on "Play Places in Butte" so interesting that we filmed her modeling the lesson with the help of fourth grade teacher Dan Ries and Mr. Ries's students at Arlee Elementary School.

Check out the lesson plans (two elementary, two middle and two high school), the videos, and the text excerpts on our Mining Childhood Classroom Resources page.