Montana: A History of Our Home Teacher's Guide--Updated and Revised

 

When You Know Better, Do Better

We recently reprinted the Teachers Guide for Montana: A History of Our Home, the fourth-grade curriculum we published in 2023, and we used this as an opportunity to update the content.

Most of the updates were straightforward: We added answers to discussion questions, updated the spellings of tribal names to align with recommendations from our Tribal Stakeholder Group, and converted the PowerPoints to Google Slides because we heard from some teachers that they couldn't open PowerPoints on their school computers. 

There's one change I was a little sad to make, and that was to the lesson "Homesteading: The Lure of Free Land." That lesson originally started with students analyzing a Northern Pacific Railway advertisement written in Polish. Because I don't read Polish, and because I knew that the Northern Pacific sent agents to Europe to recruit settlers, and because the caption in the exhibit where I found the advertisement identified it as a homestead-era advertisement, I presented this advertisement as one created by the railroad to recruit Polish farmers to immigrate to Montana.

Happily for historical accuracy, Melissa Hibbard does read Polish, and she informed me that the poster dated from around 1928 (long after the homesteading era was over) and that it was directed to Polish speakers living in Minnesota, Nebraska, and other parts of the Midwest. It was never circulated in Poland!

With this new knowledge, I edited the lesson. Now, students analyze a postcard image produced by the Great Northern Railway to lure homesteaders west. Just as before, they use Visual Thinking Strategies to do a close reading of the picture. And just as before that activity is followed by reading (and then illustrating) Danish immigrant Bertha Josephsen Anderson's reminiscence about her family's 1890 trip to Montana and first year on their homestead. 

Here's the old image. 

Here's the new image.

Both show prosperous farms, neither of which look anything like actual Montana homesteads, making them good pieces to use when teaching students media literacy and about the importance of critically evaluating sources. 

Note: I will be updating the Coming to Montana footlocker user guide, where this lesson plan originated, this summer when the footlocker returns to MTHS. (For more on how to order this or other footlockers, visit the footlocker page of our website.)