Take an IEFA Online Book Club Course for Graduate Credit

Western Montana Professional Learning Collaborative is offering two more IEFA book clubs, starting in January.

The Boarding School Era, January 7 - March 10, 2019. 30 OPI renewal units or 2 graduate credits. Registration fee: $175 (graduate credits an additional $155.)

Read and explore books focusing on the Boarding School Era including My Name is Seepeetza, Shi-Shi-Etko, Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, and Sweetgrass Basket. This course is offered online through a Moodle platform. It is divided into weekly “modules.” It is designed for kindergarten through twelfth grade teachers.

Learn more and register here.

The History of the Flathead Reservation, January 14 - March 3, 2019. 30 OPI renewal units or 2 graduate credits. Registration fee: $175 (graduate credits an additional $155.)

This online Moodle course explores the history of the Flathead Reservation by studying the following texts:

• In the Name of the Salish & Kootenai Nation: The 1855 Hell Gate Treaty and the Origin of the Flathead Indian Reservation
• A Brief History of the Salish and Pend d’Oreille Tribes 
• Salish People and the Lewis and Clark Expedition 
• Coming Back Slow: The Importance of Preserving Salish Indian Culture and Language

Learn more and register here. 

P.S. Best wishes for a joyful 2019.

Give the Gift of Recognition

Happy winter break! If you have time between caroling, skiing, and roasting chestnuts on an open fire (does anyone actually do that?), I hope you consider nominating an amazing teacher you know for one of the following awards. After all, what better gift to give someone you admire than the gift of recognition?

The nomination process for the 8th Advocacy Award for Excellence in Indian Education for All is open from now until January 24, 2019. Please take the time to nominate someone whom you know that is an outstanding Indian Education for All Advocate. And while you are at it, register to attend the 13th Annual Indian Education for All Conference, March 2-3, 2019, Carroll College, Helena, MT.

Gilder Lehrman is looking for nominations for state and national History Teacher of the Year. Any full-time educator of grades K–12 who teaches American history (including state and local history) is eligible for consideration. American history may be taught as an individual subject or as part of other subjects, such as social studies, reading, or language arts. Nominees must have at least three years of classroom teaching experience and show

• A demonstrated commitment to teaching American history (including state and local history)
• Evidence of creativity and imagination in the classroom
• Effective use of documents, artifacts, historic sites, oral histories, and other primary sources to engage students with American history. 

It's not (necessarily) Montana history but...

StudentCam is C-SPAN's annual national video documentary competition that encourages students to think critically about issues that affect our communities and our nation. This year students in grades 6-12 are asked to create a short (5-6 minute) video documentary on a topic related to the new 2019 competition theme, "What does it mean to be American? Choose a constitutional right, national characteristic, or historic event and explain how it defines the American experience." With cash prizes totaling $100,000, C-SPAN awards prizes to 150 student documentaries, and over 50 teacher advisors. Entries may be submitted no later than Sunday, January 20, 2019.    

I went to look at some of the videos the students have created in the past (impressive!) and the first one I saw was No Trespassing: Seeking Justice for Native Women, which begins with an interview with Montanan and Northern Cheyenne tribal member Gail Small.

On some level, the project reminds me of National History Day in that it asks students to create a product (in this case a documentary) around a theme. If you are interested in this type of project-based competition but teach history rather than civics, you might want to think about National History Day. You can learn more about this year's NHD theme, "Triumph and Tragedy in History," at the National History Day website. You can learn more about next spring's regional and statewide competitions at the Montana NHD site. (The state competition will be held in Bozeman on March 30, 2019. And there are projected to be FOUR regionals this coming year.) Finally, you can learn about the cash prizes offered by the Montana Historical Society for the best Montana topic and the best use of digitized newspapers at the our NHD page.

This year's theme is made for Montana history. For example:

• Triumph: The construction of the Fort Peck Dam, the invention of the Holter heart monitor, the creation of the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

• Tragedy: the Montana Sedition Act, the Hard Winter of 1886-87, the Speculator Mine Disaster, Indian boarding schools, the Marias Massacre. 

• Triumph and Tragedy: Homesteading boom and bust, construction of the transcontinental railroads, the creation of Glacier National Park, Butte: the Richest Hill on Earth, Cobell v Salazar (the mismanagement of Indian Trust Funds and Blackfeet banker Elouise Cobell's campaign to set things right). 

Find a few starting points for researching Montana topics here. Of course your students don't have to do a Montana history topic. You can incorporate NHD into any history course you teach (and remember--you can make it work for you by limiting student topic choices to the eras/geographic regions your class focuses on.

Questions? Contact Montana's NHD coordinator and Plentywood social studies teacher Michael Herdina, who is both the brains and the brawn behind NHD's resurgence in Montana. 

P.S. To write this post, I spent a little time exploring the Montana National History Day website, which is well worth to time. It is there I found a link to this Framework, created by the National History Day Minnesota. Some of it is specific to Minnesota but a lot of it will be useful to you--especially if this is your first time incorporating NHD into your curriculum. It includes graphic organizers, lesson plans, readings, and more.   

Travel Back in Time

I think the digitized newspapers on Montana Newspapers and Chronicling America are the best thing since sliced bread. Maybe even the best thing since before sliced bread. 

Never explored them? Stop reading RIGHT NOW (I promise, we'll be here for you to come back to), click on this map, and choose a newspaper close to where you live. Then go to an early paper published on your birthday (or during your birthday week). 

Are you back? Good! Find anything interesting? Did you get sucked into exploring? I thought so! 

The fact is, I've never met anyone--kid or adult--who didn't like to read historic newspapers. They are, as my colleague Zoe Ann Stoltz says, the closest thing we have to a time machine.

That's why I was so pleased to learn from our Digital Projects Librarian Natasha Hollenbach that the Montana Historical Society has new content available (and a total of 579,875 pages!) to search and browse on the web site Montana Newspapers: 

• The Thompson Falls Public Library has finished their huge push to make the Sander County Ledger/Sanders County Independent Ledger available. With this addition of the Sanders County Independent-Ledger (1925-1929) the whole surviving run from 1917 to 1963 is now available. Unfortunately a gap since exists from 1921 to 1924 but as far as we know no copies of these issues have survived. This particular date range is a great addition, since it was a new find which had never been microfilmed. 
• Hellgate High School has added the Hellgate Lance (1964-1982 and 2013-2017) to their previous run of 1983-2008.
• The Lewistown Public Library has made possible the addition of the Fergus County Argus (1920-1929), which adds to their contribution of Lewistown papers.
• Celebrate the addition of a new city with Grass Range Review (1917-1923), made possible by the Grass Range Community Foundation. 
• The River Press has made it possible to extend the date range for The River Press another 19 years, so 1889-1902 and 1915-1976 is now available.
• The University of Montana Western and the Dillon Public Library has added three years of the The Dillon Tribune (2013-2015). Dillon now has papers available from 1883 to 2015!

Montana Newspapers is one of two sites where Montana's digitized newspapers reside free of charge for researchers. The other is Chronicling America, where in addition to many other titles, you can find The River Press (1880-1888 and 1902-1914) and the Fergus County Argus (1886-1906). 

Looking for ideas on how to use these with your students? Here is a past post about activities I conducted with third through fifth graders in a gifted and talented class. Here's a post from Natasha on Using Historic Newspapers to Increase Student Understanding of World War I and here's yet a post on Resources to Help You Use Chronicling America. Looking for more inspiration? Edsitement has more suggestions for you.

Montanans respond to climate change

Did you know that "Since 1950, Montana temperatures have warmed 2.7 degrees, the fastest in the nation?" I didn't. So how are Montanans responding?

The Montana Climate Assessment website begins to answer that question. If you are interested in climate change or teach about human-environmental interaction, this site is golden. It includes information on both on how climate change is affecting Montana AND information on how Montanans are dealing with it. 

For example, check out this six-minute video on climate change and flooding, and how the Musselshell community worked together to respond to the Musselshell River's 2011 flood and rebuild infrastructure based on data. 

Or this six-minute video on how climate change is affecting agriculture and ways farmers and ranchers are adapting. 

Or read about how entomologist Diana Six is thinking about climate change and what it should mean for forest management practices. Here's a preview: "A management strategy of the future may be looking at what’s left behind after beetle kill or drought, asking why, and seeing what can be done to promote the survivors' genetics reproducing." 

Here are a few other resources on climate change's affects in Montana. The New York Times recently published this article on climate change and Yellowstone, "Your Children’s Yellowstone Will Be Radically Different." And the USGS has a website on the retreat of glaciers in Glacier National Park, along with a link to this repeat photography project, and this video designed for 9-12 classrooms, in which a climate scientist answers questions about climate change and the park. 

Do your students struggle with reading the textbook?

Two summers ago, the Montana Historical Society invited Dr. Tammy Elser, who teaches in the education department at Salish Kootenai College (SKC), to give a workshop on helping students (and especially struggling readers) read and understand informational text. It was one of the best workshops I have ever attended and I have been integrating the strategies I learned that day into almost every lesson or unit plan I've written since.

We filmed the workshop and Tammy, with the help of colleagues like Christy Mock-Stutz at the Montana Office of Public Instruction, transformed the workshop into a four credit, self-paced online course for the Teacher Learning Hub.

Targeted at teachers of fourth through eighth grade, the course uses Montana: Stories of the Land and ancillary IEFA content to demonstrates ways to help any reader by modifying lesson structure, teaching and modeling comprehension strategies, and employing fix-up strategies when comprehension breaks down.

This is a readings methods course--which is something that most social studies teachers can use, especially with the increased emphasis on reading across the curriculum and the adoption of curriculum standards that emphasize literacy in history/social studies (along with science and technical subjects.) It was certainly information I found useful.

You can take Supporting Readers with Textbooks for 4 OPI renewal units on the Teacher Learning Hub at no charge (but registration is required.) While you are there, you may want to check out some of their other offerings.

Time Travel: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

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.