When she was in grade school, my daughter loved the Good Times Travel Agency books by Linda Bailey. The Binkerton Twins would travel back in time, and it was never what they expected (for example, they became serfs, rather than a lord and lady, when they visited the Middle Ages and they were shocked by the hard work and poor living conditions.) Perhaps that's why I was smitten by this activity from one of my favorite social studies bloggers, Russell Tarr: "Design a 'Time Travel Holiday' to see a period from different viewpoints."
Tarr's initial exercise is simple: "When introducing students to a particular historical time and place, get them to research different geographical locations associated with it. The class should then produce a travel brochure designed to persuade holidaymakers about all the wonderful things to expect if they take a time-travelling vacation."
What I thought was brilliant was his followup activity: "to force students to assess the period from a negative perspective, ask them to write a dramatic complaint letter [to the travel agency] outlining all the horrible sights, sounds and smells they experienced" during their "holiday from Hell."
In his post, Tarr expands on variations of this activity (and provides details for visiting the sites of Ancient Rome).
I, of course, started thinking about how the activity could be applied to Montana. Certainly, students could promote "time travel" adventures to the romantic Old West, promoting a steamboat trip up the Missouri or Yellowstone rivers, a visit to a gold rush town, or to the cattle frontier of eastern Montana. Then tourists could complain about the lack of fresh fruit, being forced to push their stagecoach out of the mud, or the tedium of a steamboat voyage.
These time traveler assignments are good examples of RAFT writing. RAFT stands for role, audience, format, topic. In a RAFT assignment students take on a Role (in this case, promotional travel agent or unhappy customer), and write for an Audience (potential customer or misleading travel agent), adopt a Format (brochure or letter), and focus on a Topic (life in the assigned place and historical era). We have a RAFT-based lesson plan on Montana during World War I. If you want to learn more about RAFT or get some other suggestions for RAFT assignments I recommend these earlier posts.
What Tarr's assignment does so well though is insisting that students take on two roles, one that looks at the positive and one that looks at the negative. I can imagine this dual approach beyond his original time travel tourism trope. For example, fliers recruiting homesteaders or men to work in the Butte mines matched by letters home from miners or homesteaders. Or letters from the same miner or homesteader--one back to family members during the journey anticipating the opportunities to be found and another after they had settled in. (Or in the case of homesteading, one during the wet years and the other during the drought.)
There are lots of possibilities here, so I hope you take it and run. If you do, I'd love to hear how you used it and how your students responded.
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