These are a few of my favorite things

The last couple of weeks I've been publishing thematic lists of old blog posts that I thought might still be interesting to folks (one focused on elementary classrooms, and a second on teaching strategies.) Today I thought I'd turn from the blog to our Educator Resources page to feature a few of my favorite older, and sometimes overlooked, lessons and resources.


Montana Women at Work: Clothesline Timeline Lesson Plan (Designed for grades 4-12) This primary-source based lesson asks students to analyze historic photographs to draw conclusions about women and work from the 1870s through the 2010s. Students will discover that Montana women have always worked, but that discrimination, cultural expectations, and changing technology have influenced the types of work women undertook.

Resources for Montana History Research Projects: This information is not gathered neatly in one place--but we've created a number of lists of suggested topics--with links to more information--that would be useful for students conducting research projects. 

• First is our list of Montana History Topics for National History Day. We revise this list each year to match the theme--but your students don't have to be working on NHD projects for this list to be useful. For each topic we include a list of a few primary and secondary sources (including internet sources) to get students started on their research. 

• Extra! Montana News 1864-1922 is a list of topics--from anti-Chinese discrimination and bison hunting and extermination to the Mullan Road and statehood. For each topic, a volunteer searched the Montana newspapers digitzed on Chronicling America to find articles. Each topic page includes an overview, a list of key dates, links to some relevant newspaper articles, and suggested search terms for finding more information.

•  Montana Biographies and Gallery of Outstanding Montanans both offer information on notable Montanans and provide good starting points for biography projects.

• Resilience: Stories of Montana Indian Women is a booklet that the Montana Office of Public Instruction published as a PDF for download. It features profiles of Indian women, originally created for the Montana Historical Society's Women's History Matters Project. The short online essays on Women's History Matters provide another rich starting point--especially since each comes with a bibliography.

Girl from the Gulches: The Story of Mary Ronan Study Guide (Designed for students 6-10). This study guide includes lesson plans, vocabulary, chapter summaries and questions, alignment to the Common Core, and other information to facilitate classroom use of Girl from the Gulches: The Story of Mary Ronan, as told to Margaret Ronan, edited by Ellen Baumler. Set in the second half of the nineteenth century, this highly readable 222-page memoir details Mary Sheehan Ronan’s journey across the Great Plains, her childhood on the Colorado and Montana mining frontiers, her ascent to young womanhood in Southern California, her return to Montana as a young bride, and her life on the Flathead Indian Reservation as the wife of an Indian agent. Book One, which provides a child’s-eye view of the mining frontier, is available to download as a PDF (Lexile Level 1180L). Classroom sets of Girl from the Gulches can be purchased from the Montana Historical Society Museum Store by calling toll free 1-800-243-9900. 

Reader's Theater: Letters Home from Montanans at War (Designed for 7th-12th). This three-to-five period unit asks students to work in groups to read and interpret letters written by soldiers at war, from the Civil War to the Operation Iraqi Freedom. After engaging in close reading and conducting research to interpret the letters, they will perform the letters as reader’s theater.

"Native American Trade Routes and the Barter Economy" includes two learning activities intended designed to complement Chapter 2 of the Montana: Stories of the Land textbook. Designed for use in grades seven through nine, Activity One, "Resources and Routes," focuses primarily on mapping pre-contact trade routes, with a special emphasis on Montana. Activity Two, "Trading Times," asks students to simulate the process through which various products from different regional tribes were bartered and disseminated to gain a better understanding of pre-contact barter economy and how it compares with the modern-day cash economy.

Hands-on History Footlockers: I've recently touted our new footlockers (like the Original Governor's Mansion or the redesigned Coming to Montana) but some of the older titles are great too. Two particular favorites of mine are Stones and Bones, which explores the earliest evidence of Montana's human history; and  The Home Fires: Montana and World War II, which describes aspects of everyday life in Montana during the 1941-1945 war years. You can see the complete list of footlockers and find information on how to order them here. 

More reading for winter break

Thanks to a reader in Billings, I recently discovered two (new to me) websites. Neither have anything directly to do with Montana history but both are oh-so-cool.

The Disability History Museum: "The Disability History Museum's mission is to foster a deeper understanding about how changing cultural values, notions of identity, laws and policies have shaped and influenced the experience of people with disabilities, their families and their communities over time." This virtual museum includes a library with over 3,000 primary source documents and images; and a number of lesson plans. Other parts of the site (including online exhibits) are under development.

Emerging America offers lesson plans, primary source sets, online exhibits about western Massachusetts reform movements, and teaching strategies and tools to help special education students and English language learners learn through inquiry.

Looking for other online sources for history content and teaching material? Try Teachinghistory.org a site I've touted many times before. There is so much good information here--teaching strategies, website reviews, lesson plans and more. Created by the  Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM), the site admirably achieves its "goal of placing history content, teaching strategies, current research and issues, community building, and easy access to resources at center stage."

Reading for Winter Break/Funding Opportunities for Cultural Institutions

I've mentioned before how much I enjoy Glenn Wiebe's blog, History Tech. I especially appreciate his reports from national conferences. I've never had the opportunity to attend NCSS, for example--and I bet that's true for most of you, too. But you can travel along with Glenn, who gives great summaries of sessions, plus links to more information. It's genuinely reinvigorating.--just like conferences are supposed to be.

If you teach geography, world cultures, or history, I encourage you to schedule a quick trip over winter break as an armchair traveler by finding time to read Glenn's reports from NCSS--or, as he calls it, History Nerdfest 2016. You'll be glad you did.

On an entirely different note: I just learned about two grant opportunities for cultural institutions. If you have connections, please pass these along to your local library and/or museum.

• World War I in America: "Beginning Fall 2016, stipends of $1200–$1800 are available to all public, academic, and community college libraries, museums and historical societies, and nonprofit community organizations for public programming exploring the First World War and its resonances today. Presented by Library of America with support from the NEH, World War I and America is a two-year initiative that aims to bring veterans and their families together with the general public to explore the continuing relevance of the war by reading, discussing, and sharing insights into the writings of Americans who experienced it firsthand."
• Creating Humanities Communities:  "The goal of these grants is to make connections between organizations that will foster community cohesion on a local or regional level. Applicants may define community in a variety of ways (by focusing, for example, on a place such as a village or town, or on a common interest or a common theme), and the programs that the cooperating institutions carry out together must aim to enhance the importance of the humanities in people’s lives." And NEH is especially looking for applications from Montana, from rural areas, and that include Native American organizations and communities as lead applicants and project partners. 

Best of ... Teaching Strategies

Teaching Montana History began in 2008 as the Montana History and Heritage Education listserv and has been published as a blog since 2011. That's a long time--so as we approach the new year, I thought it would be fun to highlight some older posts. Earlier I highlighted posts on elementary resources. Today the focus is teaching strategies.

• Speaking and Listening Strategies: This post focuses on useful strategies for structuring meaningful class discussions, including gallery walks, concentric circles/speed dating, structured academic controversies, and Socratic circles.
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• Teaching Students to Ask Questions: Asking good questions is harder than most people think. This posts offers two starting points for helping students learn this important skill.
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• Visual Thinking Strategies--My New Favorite Technique: I've written a lot of posts on this over the year. Here's one.
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• Montana Newspapers and Chronicling America: Here are some strategies for getting students started in the digitized newspaper collections.

Followup to Teaching Indian Literature and/or Literature about Indians

My post "Teaching Indian Literature and/or Literature about Indians" drew a lot of excellent feedback. 

Retired teacher (and one of the upcoming recipients of the 2017 Governor's Humanities Awards) Dottie Susag reminde me of another great resource on literature by and about Native Americans, Roots and Branches: a Resource of Native American Literatures, Themes, Lessons, and Bibliographies, which Dottie wrote for National Council of Teachers of English, which published it in 1998. She particularly recommends the following chapters: 

• Chapter 1:  "Themes, Rationales, and Subthemes," which compares/contrasts the way popular non-native authors deal with young-adult conflicts with a few native authors who deal with similar themes and topics;  
• Chapter 3: Secondary Level Units, Activities, and Lessons, especially the 6-Day Unit "Bias and Stereotype in Literature about Native Americans" (72-77), and 
• Chapter 7: Non-Native Authors and Their Stories about Native Americans (213-237)

By the way, you can bring Dottie to your class to work with students on "Critical Literacy with text by and about American Indians" for FREE through Humanities Montana's Speakers in the Schools program. I've attended workshops Dottie has given for teachers and I always walk away having learned something new.

Missoula high school teacher Betty Bennett chimed in with specific book recommendations, writing

I love Fools Crow, by James Welch.  It opens the door to a rich history of treatment of Native Tribes in Montana.  There are great units from the OPI site and I have found some great references that fill out the topic.  I find that many of my students get more involved in the books is they know it is based on real events.

(In addition to the OPI unit, written, incidentally by Dottie Susag, teachers may wish to consider to complement their study of Fools Crow with a lesson plan on the Baker Massacre, created for us by Bozeman teacher Derek Strahn.) Betty continued: 

I also really like Who Will Tell my Brother?  By Marlene Carvell.  She uses the same poetic narrative in a journal format.  It deals with school mascots which I think is a very timely topic."

(Carvell’s sons, like Evan and his brother in the book, have a white mother and their father is a member of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe. Carvell’s books are well regarded by American Indian reviewers for their authentic portrayals of Indians.)

For her part, Susan Seastrand, who teaches at the Ayers Colony School, recommends the book Two Old Women, for which Velma Wallis created a teaching unit for OPI. Susan writes: Every time I have to do something that I think is hard, or it's too cold, or I just want to complain about, I think of those two old women and what they had to endure.  I realize I have nothing to complain about." A lesson we could all to take to heart.

Become an Ambassador of Natural History and Conservation

The National Museum of Forest Service History is looking for K-12 educators in all areas of study to become Ambassadors of Natural History and Conservation. They are building an incredible facility in Missoula, Montana and need teachers to help them build a strong, viable education department.


To this end, they are hosting an inaugural conference May 9-11, 2017 at Mountain Sky Guest Ranch/American Explorers Basecamp in Emigrant, MT, (35 minutes from Yellowstone National Park). Participants will also attend follow up meeting (date to be determined by participants).

Conference Collaborators will be attending educators, the National Museum of Forest Service History in Missoula, Montana and Teaching Primary Sources: The Library of Congress. Why participate? As a teacher, this conference will allow you to  

• Create activities and or lesson plans that will make your classroom instruction come alive in the areas of History, Science, Conservation, Literature, Math, Art, and even Technology.

• Learn how to access, assess and accumulate materials from the databases of both National Museum Forest Service and the Library of Congress.

• Earn PIR credit hours and while enjoying this state-of-the-art facility where together we can greet Spring in a whole new fashion. Design your classroom studies before you leave for summer.!

• Have an incredible opportunity to become involved in helping build the education division of the NATIONAL MUSEUM FOR FOREST SERVICE HISTORY. YOU can
• Be in on the ground floor of an exciting opportunity.
• Meet and collaborate with educators from Montana as well as across the U.S. as well as staff from the Library of Congress: Teaching with Primary Sources and The National Museum of Forest Service History.
• Build a model Lesson Plan based on direct instruction from Library of Congress-Teaching Primary Sources facilitator.(Denver based).
• Recreate, plan and dream high on a mountainside overlooking the edge of Yellowstone National Park- additional ways to deliver more exciting, innovative and memorable lessons to your students.

How can you participate? Apply to become an ambassador for the NMFSH. Applications are due Feburary 1, 2017.

If you are selected, you will earn credits and extra stipend to cover your travel and incidental meal expenses. Additionally, all lodging and meals are covered on site at the Basecamp in May 2017.

If you are chosen, you will have an opportunity to

Return completed applications to

Cheryl Hughes

Education Coordinator

National Museum of Forest Service History

PO BOX 2772

Missoula, Montana. 59806

PowerPoint Lesson Plans

We created our first PowerPoint-based lesson plan in 2010. That particular lesson plan, "Railroads Transform Montana," emphasizes how trains affected the social, economic, and physical landscape of Montana. The delivery method is a scripted PowerPoint, essentially providing you the expertise to become your own guest speaker. 

Since 2010 we've added a number of these PowerPoint Lesson plans to our offerings. Some of them are written to be interactive (see, for example, the lesson on the "Yanktonai Dakota (Sioux) Winter Count.")  Others offer information in a more traditional lecture format (see, for example, "Sun Dance in Silver Bow: Urban Indian Poverty in the Shadow of the Richest Hill on Earth". Several of them were created as part of larger units (see, for example, Montana’s Twentieth-Century Immigrants: Mexicans, Hutterites, and Hmong (designed for use with the Coming to Montana: Immigrants from around the World Footlocker). All of them (I believe) deserve wider use.

That's why we've created a new page on our website, PowerPoint Lesson Plans, to make it easier to find these PowerPoints and incorporate them into your curriculum. I hope you find them useful. Feedback welcome. 

Best of...Elementary Posts

Teaching Montana History began in 2008 as the Montana History and Heritage Education listserv. That's a long time ago--so as we approach the new year, I thought it would be fun to highlight some older posts, starting with ones about elementary resources (since I don't focus on K-5 classrooms enough.)

My Favorite Hanukkah Story and How to Teach It: In 1993, when members of a hate group threw a rock through a Billings Jewish family's window during Hanukkah, the community organized in opposition. Over 10,000 Billings residents displayed pictures of menorahs in their windows as an expression of solidarity with their Jewish neighbors. 

Teaching Montana History in Fourth Grade: In what is one of my most-read elementary posts, I provided notes toward a fourth grade curriculum. 

Two New Women's History Lesson Plans--Just in Time for Women's History Month and New Lesson Plan Investigates the Effects of Title IX: These provide links and descriptions to women's history related lesson plans geared toward grades 4-8 (and one for older students as well).

Using Primary Sources with Elementary Students includes information and links to lessons we've created for younger students, including K-3.

Speaking of elementary opportunities, I received an intriguing email recently from Kathleen Dent of Innovative Educational Consulting. She wrote: 

"We are coordinating a fun, free program for third-fifth grade classes. It is called the Montana History Mystery Quest and will encourage students to research a bit about their own community, make up fun clues, and then share information virtually with another class in the state. Teachers can register their class here." See the flier below for more information--and if you choose to participate, let me know how it goes.

Using Historic Newspapers to Increase Student Understanding of World War I

At MEA-MFT in October, my colleague Natasha Hollenbach offered a presentation on using digitized historic newspapers to conduct research on World War I. She graciously agreed to share some of that information to the list.

While she focused on World War I, you can adapt many of the skills and strategies to other events.  Also while primarily focused on history classes, several of these ideas could be used for English, debate, or civics classes. 

The Montana Historical Society currently has 536,000 pages of historical newspapers available online, either through Chronicling America and Montana Newspapers. This is less than 5 percent of our overall collection but still a useful resource for researchers and teachers. Here’s Natasha:

The front page of the September 27, 1918, issue of the Roundup Record is an excellent example of the types of World War I content found in newspapers.  Covering everything from the battles at the front, deaths and promotions of local soldiers, liberty loans, the influenza epidemic, various aspects of the draft, and even fluff stories (in this case a photo of a French soldier having his first American donut), newspapers like this one provide a wealth of information.

Often students complain that they don’t like history because to them it’s just memorizing dates, people, and events.  But that’s not history.  History is the personal stories of how individuals or communities created and dealt with events of their time.  Below are some sample searches and suggested techniques for moving students to a new understanding of history.

Immigrants and the War

For example, some textbook descriptions about US entry into World War I often include discussion of German (and other) immigrants’ opposition to US entry, and these often suggest that they were more loyal to their native country than to their adopted one.  In response, I recommend the article “Montana Boy to Fight His Father in the Trenches," Ronan Pioneer, September 14, 1917, p.4.

Have your students write a reaction.  How would it make them feel to realize that they would be fighting a war opposite their father, brother, cousins, and/or friends?  How would that affect their attitude on US entry?  What is the impact of the tension between personal loyalties and national allegiance? How does this article confirm or contradict textbook views of immigrants and the war? And why do they think the newspaper published this story? Solely as human interest? Or was there a political agenda?

Jeannette Rankin

One of Montana’s most famous World War I stories is Congresswoman Jeanette Rankin’s vote against the war. To find articles describing her vote, I limiting the date range of my search to April 6, 1917-April 13, 1917 (the week after her vote) and then searched Jeanette Rankin “as a phrase”.  I could have limited it to Montana also, but I was interested in national coverage of the event.

Below are links to a number of results.

• Columbus Commercial (Mississippi), April 8, 1917, p, 2.
• “2,000,000 Men in 2 Years.” Topeka State Journal, April 6, 1917, p, 1.
• Ward County Independent (North Dakota), April 12, 1917, p, 2
• “Most Dramatic Congress Scene in U.S. History.” Harrisburg Telegraph (Pennsylvania), April 6, 1917, p. 8.
• “Woman Votes No.” Free Trader-Journal (Illinois), April 6, 1917, p. 3.
• “By a Vote of Three Hundred Seventy-Three to Fifty The House Casts Lot With The Powers of the Entente”. Hawaiian Gazette, April 6, 1917, p. 1.
• “Dramatic Scene.” Daily Gate City and Constitution-Democrat (Iowa), April 6, 1917, p. 1.

Ask your students: Which articles do they find more convincing?  What details differ between articles?  What opinion on women’s suffrage do you think the newspaper supports and why?  How is the attitude towards the vote different than what students have been exposed to before this (contemporary coverage was generally much more negative than we view her vote today) and why is it different?

If you teach English/writing, perhaps you could use these articles to examine how word choice affects meaning and to illustrate different writing tones.  Several of these articles clearly came from the same source but have been slightly changed. How do those changes affect how the article’s tone?

Liberty Loans

The National History Day 2017 Themebook includes a list of ten strategies for using digitized newspapers, including two involving advertisements.  (For the full list, see pages 65.) Both work well for Liberty Loan advertisements.  To find these ads, set the date range for 1917-1919 and search liberty loan “as a phrase”.  Even limiting the search to Montana will return a lot of hits.  Looking through them, choose a few that are full page ads.  The liberty loan ads are both fascinating and slightly terrifying.  They have this overall feel that their motto is “give until it hurts … and then give more”.  

Consider paring one of the ads with the article that ran in the Columbia Falls Columbian, April 11, 1918.  The story, which talks about volunteers going house to house collecting money, includes this line: “while it has been estimated what each person should subscribe, there is nothing to prevent an over-subscription, neither will the party … be told what his allotment is, but he will be asked to subscribe for as much as he cares to, and if the sum does not equal the figure estimated to be his share, the matter will be taken up in a different way.” There are so many things you could talk about with this:  privacy, peer pressure, big data and how it’s used, and official intimidation/coercion to name a few.

Sedition

Lastly, instead of having the newspapers as your focus, consider using them to supplement other materials.  If you haven’t looked at the Montana Sedition Project, you should. It documents the 79 Montanans convicted of sedition in 1918-19. Consider having your students conduct a simulation. Assign a different person to pairs of students (one to argue for convicting the person and the other to argue against).  Have them use the newspapers both to find out generally what was considered sedition and how it was discussed and to see if they can find information specifically about their person.  I did a quick search for the individuals listed on the Sedition Project’s “Selected Profiles” page and I found all but one of them (Janet Smith) in Montana Newspapers (which seemed to have better results than Chronicling America, but I recommend students checking both).  I found the coverage of Ben Kahn particularly compelling.  Compare how they describe what he said over these three articles.

• “STOP! LOOK AND LISTEN!” Big Timber Pioneer, May 9, 1918, p. 4.
• “Sedition Act Up To Supreme Court”. Choteau Montanan, May 9, 1919, p. 5.
• “Clemency Is Urged In Kahn Sedition Matter.” Dillon Tribune, December 17, 1920, p. 4.

Newspapers can be a fabulous resource for you and your students so I hoped I sparked some inspiration for how you can incorporate them into your classroom.  When you do, please let us know what you did and how it worked out.