Category: History

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Happy Birthday, America! 250 Looks Good On You!

I’m a big believer that birthdays ought to be celebrated and seen as a special occasion rather than treated like “just another day.” I mean, it’s a day to celebrate and honor the gift of someone or something being part of this world, so shouldn’t it be treated as something special? As we get closer to Independence Day, I’ve thought a lot about America and the fun things we do to celebrate her every year– fireworks, parades, festivals, concerts, barbeques with family and friends, and other kinds of get togethers with people we love. There are so many ways to celebrate our wonderful country!

Besides taking an entire day to celebrate America’s birthday, it’s fun to find engaging and educational activities for our students or kids to do in the days leading up to the Fourth of July. This year is even more special because America is turning 250 years old– and that’s really something to celebrate! Below you will find a collection of ideas you can use with your own children or with your students if school is still in session for you! These activities can be used and adapted for many ages.

  • Patriotic sensory bins- Use food coloring to dye white rice red and blue, then the three colors of rice together to create a red, white, and blue sensory base. Add in plastic stars, beads, coins, and miniature flags to make a fun patriotic themed sensory bin.
  • Print off and use the patriotic word scramble or I-Spy page found here.
  • Take a drive around town and keep tally of all the flags you can see as you drive. You could even create a “worksheet” to use before hand with space to tally how many flags you find of different sizes (small, medium, and large).
  • Teach your kids or students about the significance of the Declaration of Independence. For older kids, go into more depth about the meaning behind some of the most powerful phrases from the document.
  • Learn about the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
  • Have students write a “break up letter” from America to England, including what England did to cause the break up.
  • Research Independence Day celebrations from across the country. Talk about the different ways people celebrate the birth of our nation.
  • Read the words to the Pledge of Allegiance together and talk about what they mean. Do the same for the National Anthem.
  • For older kids, have them create some sort of artistic representation of what makes America who she is. Is it the people? The food? Music? Landscape? 
  • Create a timeline of events that lead up to Americans declaring independence.
  • Have students write a letter to America from England begging for forgiveness and to come back, including promises to change the things that had driven Americans away.
  • Take a look at this post to find more patriotic ideas!

Happy Independence Day! We hope you enjoy celebrating this great nation and that you enjoy the time with those you love!

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Encouraging Cultural Understanding

Imagine attending school in a place that is foreign to you, or hearing kids in the halls say cruel or incorrect things about your family’s culture. Imagine knowing that your people played an important role in a historical event, only to have their impact brushed over or even completely ignored by your history teacher. Situations like this happen all too often, but as teachers, we can make a change by including instruction about diverse cultures into our curriculum. By using the sixth “C” of the 7 Cs of education, cross-cultural understanding, we can help our students understand different cultures and people. 

Cross-cultural understanding can be taught in many ways. The goal of creating understanding about other cultures is to help students see that everyone has value, and that everyone’s story is important. Including cross-cultural instruction may look different to each content area and from grade to grade, but is equally important across the board. Cross-cultural education might look like any of the following:

  • Culturally Responsible Teaching: use current events to connect events from the past to things that are happening today. This helps students to see that we can all benefit from and learn from the past. It helps events from the past feel less distant and foreign.
  • Integrating cultural understanding into curriculum: teach your students about different cultures and people. Highlight their unique traditions and customs. Include all parties when teaching about historical events. 
  • Invite students to teach: When appropriate, invite students to “show and tell” about their family’s culture or history. If you have a student with Italian ancestry, invite them to teach the class about some of their family’s traditions. Perhaps you have a student who has family ties to Ghana, Japan, or Brazil. Give them an opportunity to share about their culture.
  • Model good listening: when others are sharing about their culture or another culture, show your students what good listening looks like. This will help them to respect others’ values, beliefs, and traditions.
  • Read books that have characters from all sorts of various backgrounds. This helps students to realize that situations, feelings, and life events are universal to all people and cultures.
  • Invite students to choose a country to learn more about. Have them share their findings with the class, and encourage them to involve the class in some aspect of what they’ve learned– learn a dance, try food from that place, or even learn some words from the language spoken by the people of that country.
  • Invite guest speakers to come into your classroom. Perhaps you have a Native American student whose father does hoop dancing that would be willing to come show students some dances. When teaching about ancient Egypt, invite a historian to come in and show artifacts. If you are learning about different kinds of art from around the world, invite an artist to come in and demonstrate one of the types of art you’ve learned about.
  • If you have a student who is from another country, take time to help the rest of the class understand more about that student’s country. Invite the student to share more about their culture.

However you choose to integrate it, culturally diverse instruction benefits all students. Cross cultural understanding can help to bring people together and can help students see that much of the human experience is universal. Perhaps the most important lesson of cross-cultural education is that all people matter, all cultures are important, all stories need to be shared, and all voices deserve to be heard.

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How They Croaked– A Totally Fascinating Read

It’s often tricky to find books that will capture the interest of reluctant readers. It’s a fine balance between providing a challenge, but not too much of a challenge: you want to find a book that isn’t so far below grade level that they get bored quickly, and you definitely don’t want to find a book that is so far off from their current reading level that they get frustrated and end up giving up all together. 

Thankfully, there are authors that just understand this, who write books that are engaging, just challenging enough, and will capture and hold the attention of their readers. One of those authors is Georgia Bragg— she has a knack for writing books that are so much fun! One book of hers in particular, is at the top of my “Books for Reluctant Readers” list: How They Croaked: The Awful Ends of the Awfully Famous. 

In this book, Bragg details the awful demises of nineteen historically famous people like Cleopatra, George Washington, Marie Curie, and Edgar Allen Poe, among others. Each chapter focuses on one individual, and recounts a little about their life and what they are famous for, then describes their ultimate fate. Sometimes a little gruesome, always historically accurate, and always fascinating, each chapter is educational and engaging. Chapters are short— usually about 2-5 pages, and the book overall is a very quick read (I sat down and read it in its entirety in just a couple of hours). It’s a great option for kids between ages 9-13, but would honestly be a great read for ages 14+ as well. 

While I never had the chance to teach this book to my students, I did recommend it several times. If I had had the chance, I would have taught it to my 8th grade classes. Not only does it provide readers with interesting facts, it lends itself to excellent teaching opportunities. Below are a few ideas for teaching it with a whole class:

  • Split your class up into partnerships and assign a chapter to each group. Have them read their assigned chapter then create a slideshow or other sort of presentation to teach the rest of the class about their famous person and their demise. 
  • Read the entire book as a whole class, focusing on a chapter or two every day.
    • With each chapter, display pictures of the person it’s about. 
    • Some of the chapters discuss different medical technologies, practices, methods, etc. that are different than we have today. Take time to educate students about these different medical practices.
    • After you have finished reading the whole book, assign students to pick a famous person who is NOT in the book and create their own chapter about their person, including illustrations or pictures.
    • Make a timeline showing the birth and death dates of all nineteen people from the book.
  • For sake of time, choose your top ten favorite chapters and only teach those ones to the whole class. Have students choose four more chapters to read independently. 
  • As you read the book, have students fill out the “All You Need to Know” worksheet provided below.

Not only is this book a great non-fiction read, it also provides super cross-curricular instruction, as it contains both historical and scientific elements, and allows for a plethora of learning opportunities. 

Give it a go with your classes; I bet they’ll love it. And if you don’t have junior high aged classes or kids, read it yourself and enjoy!

If you enjoyed Croaked, you might also like How They Choked also by Georgia Bragg. In it, Bragg details how famous people royally messed up. It’s equally as engaging and educational as Croaked.

** Free printable is for classroom or personal use only. It is not intended for resale in any way. **

How They Croaked WSDownload
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Another Non-Fiction Book That is Fun to Teach

A while back, I wrote a post about non-fiction books providing really cool teaching opportunities in the classroom, and highlighted one book that I had great success with while teaching junior high school. You can find that post here. Today, I thought I’d highlight another book I had great success teaching with my seventh grade classes: Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World by Jennifer Armstrong.

Shipwreck tells the story of Ernest Shackleton and his crew of 27 men and their 19 month ordeal of being stuck in Antarctica. The story begins in 1914 as the crew sets sail from England, headed to Antarctica, hoping to be the first crew to cross the entire continent from one side to the other. Things go terribly wrong five months into their trip when their ship, The Endurance gets trapped in ice, and eventually is crushed and then sinks. The crew must face the harshest conditions, low food rations, and high emotions as they try to get to help. Miraculously, all 28 men survive the ordeal and make it home. It truly is an inspiring story of grit and determination.

To introduce this book, I would use an anticipatory guide where I told students they were going on a trip, and they could only take 5 personal items with them in their bag. They wouldn’t have access to power, there wouldn’t be cell phone service or Wi-Fi, and other technology would be limited. Food and sleeping gear would be provided, but everything else was up to them. They had to choose their items, then defend their choices. 

Following that activity, I would have them take a true/false “quiz” with facts about Antarctica. Students were always fascinated by the cool facts they learned about this giant ice continent. 

With that, we were ready to start reading! We would go one chapter at a time, and go over new vocabulary words as we read (there are LOTS of new words in the book). We would read the book during January, which is one of the coldest months where I live. I would always take my classes outside for a while (not long enough to harm them), so they could feel how cold it was, and remind them that what the crew felt was even colder. 

We did activities that involved map reading, learning about different kinds of ice, and comparing our diets and calorie intake to that of the crew, We tracked the crew’s expedition and charted it on a map, using longitude and latitude. We learned about the type of wildlife that lives down there. We compared facts about Antarctica with the state where we live– things like land size, wildlife, population, weather, etc. We journaled as if we were part of the crew, and learned about the kind of sailing technology they had. We measured out the size of their lifeboats and marked it with tape on the floor, then had several students fit inside the outline so that they could see how cramped it would have been. We would end the unit by watching a documentary about the expedition, the crew, and what happened to them after they made it back home.

I did my best to make the experience as authentic as possible so that students could really “feel” what it would have been like to be part of the crew of the Endurance. Students enjoyed the unit and had several hands-on opportunities as we read, which kept them engaged and focused on what we were reading. Because of the activities we did, we covered several other content areas like math, science, writing, and history. 

As an adult reading the book, I also found it fascinating and never tired of this unit. I looked forward to teaching it each year. It was definitely filed under my “Non-Fiction Books Don’t Have to be Boring” file!

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History of Book Clubs (VIDEO)

People have been getting together to discuss texts in newspapers, books, and letters since the invention of the printing press. Dennis Adams over at the Beaufort County Library website wrote a brief article on the history of book clubs, mentioning “literary salons of Paris,” which were social gatherings of the higher class (writers, politicians, artists) that were done regularly in a private place of residence. In some of these gatherings, the hostesses were authors themselves. Coffee house settings were also popular, although slightly less formal, and more common among the men. Keep reading to see how Book Clubs have shaped our literary society:

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