Ideas that Work

April 20, 4 p.m.-5 p.m. will be our last online PD for the year. The topic will be "The New Montana Content Standards for Social Studies." (Register here.)

I hope it will be good, but it will be hard to beat the March online PD, "Hooks! Humor, Stories, and Other Ways to Bring Montana History to Life." The teachers who participated arrived prepared to share ideas for hooking kids on Montana history--and it was fabulous. I'll do my best to summarize some of the conversation.

Fifth grade teacher Ron Buck (Shelby) began his unit on the Speculator Mine disaster by donning a fedora with an index card that says "Ace Detective" tucked in the headband. He armed his students with magnifying glasses and told them that they were going to become ace detectives too and sent them to stations around the room to find ten facts. At each station there was a newspaper article or other primary source--students spent about ten to fifteen minutes investigating the sources, and they were so enthralled that no one finished early. Later he had them explore telegrams to and from families and photographs from the disaster. When Ron does this--and he does it often with different topics--he finds five to eight compelling sources and makes multiple copies, clearly labeling the stations so that students know which sources they've looked at. 

Elementary librarian Ruth Ferris (Billings) suggested another possible hook for a lesson on the disaster: cards with names and information about specific miners--with the idea that students could find out whether they survived or not (modeled on the Holocaust Museum, where, when you visit, you get a card with a specific person's name on it.) She said that Big Huge Labs had a template for creating free trading cards.  

High school teacher Cynthia Wilondek (Big Fork) said she uses the Montana ghost stories in Beyond Spirit Tailings: Montana's Mysteries, Ghosts, and Haunted Places by Ellen Baumler to hook her students. She finds that talking about folklore makes students even more hungry to separate truth from fiction. (Ellen has two other books of ghost stories: Spirit Tailings: Ghost Tales from Virginia City, Butte, and Helena and Montana Chillers (which is written for upper elementary and middle school readers). Another activity Cynthia recommended for middle or high school is a "Pass the Picture" activity. Each student gets a picture from the same time period (there are GREAT ones from the 1930s.) Every student writes the first sentence of a story based on their picture. Then they pass the image and their sentence to the left. The next person writes the second sentence, etc.) The stories can get pretty fantastic--and they really pique the students' interest in learning more about the Depression.

High school teacher Kim Konen (Dillon) touted food and field trips. She serves students Butte pasties and other historical taste sensations and takes them on historic walking tours, including one of their own town. (You can find walking tour information for many towns here, and information about historic sites across the state here. Kim also takes her students to Butte, where among many other sites, they see some of the playground equipment that was once in Columbia Gardens (they loved the PBS movie Remembering Columbia Gardens.) 

Jen Hall (middle school, Eureka) also does a local historical walking tour with her students using historical photos (as well as a weeklong history fieldtrip!). She got the idea from Ellen Baumler, who worked with Helena third-grade teachers on a "then and now" walking tour. Ellen's tour is now a published book (and I can provide class sets to anyone touring Helena), but it started as folders of photocopies of historical photos (and a walk to the same spots shown in the photos for the "now.") When my son did this in third grade, he also was required to take an adult on a tour of three historic spots. The adult (me in this case) completed a "tour guide evaluation form," which he returned to school in order to be deputized as an official historic tour guide (He got a badge. At a ceremony. It was a BIG deal!) I've got copies of the evaluation and letter the teachers sent home, so if you want to use this as a model, email me and I'll send it along. 

Seventh and eighth grade teacher Laurie Enebo (Glasgow) engages her students by having them create ledger art using information from Montana: Stories of the Land. (I suggested the tribal history timelines published by OPI might be a good resource for this as well).  She also has her students play "Stump the Panel" throughout the year, whenever she has an extra ten minutes. To play, all students must come up with ten Montana history questions and answers from their textbook. She draws four students' names at random to be the "panel" and then draws names at random to choose the questioner. If the panelist gets the right answer, he stays on the panel. If she gets the wrong answer, the questioner has twenty seconds to tell (and confirm the right answer by showing where they found it in the book (so writing down page numbers is key). If she does, she gets to take the other students' place on the panel.  

Fifth-sixth grade teacher Kimber Gebhardt (Circle) brings in artifacts that relate to homesteading--and she has students bring in family heirlooms too (after interviewing family members about them). That reminded me of a lesson plan created by Chester high school teacher Renee Rasmussen many years ago that also featured family heirloom projects.

 Elementary Librarian Ruth Ferris said she will sometimes play twenty questions with historical objects she thinks her students won't recognize. She also recommended using picture books, historical fiction, and memoirs to hook students on Montana history, particularly Shep: Our Most Loyal Dog, Hattie Big Sky, and Girl from the Gulches: The Story of Mary Ronan (for which we created this study guide).

It's always great to hear about something new, so if you have a great hook--and I'm sure you do--let me know about it so I can share it with teachers across the state. They'll appreciate it (as will I)!