Summer SAVY, Session 5 Day 1, “The Making of America: Rebellion, Revolt, and Resolution” (3rd-4th)
Hello families! Good news—I cannot believe how many of these students are REALLY INTO HISTORY! It’s a dream class! Thank you for sharing your kids with us–myself and our classroom assistant, Ms. Chandler–this week. I can tell from the very first day that it will be a fantastic adventure back in time.
I always begin my classes with an exercise called “Compass Points”. (https://pz.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Compass%20Points_0.pdf) I use this for students to generate their own questions about class rules, schedules, activities, things that they may be excited and/or worried about, suggestions they may have for being successful, and topics for the week. I especially pay attention to what students “Need to Know”. The students have questions from anything from “When is lunch?” to “What kinds of technology did they have back then?” to “How far back in time are we going?” This allows me to answer the questions and also see if kids are shy or worried or excited or interested in a specific topic. I always adjust my instruction based on these questions!
From here, I pre-assessed the students with about 20 images from the Revolutionary Period and existing structures. Some are easy, some are tricky. I had a student who had just visited Paul Revere’s house, so he was the only student who got that image! The other images were the Great Seal, the Old State Building in Massachusetts, Washington Crossing the Delaware painting, Ben Franklin, Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, the Preamble to the Constitution, and many more. This is a great way to get a sense of the background knowledge and introduce many of the lessons. Many lessons are connected to the images, and we will visit them again.
After lunch, we discussed how the class is organized. Rather than going in a strict chronological order, we are incorporating a STEAM protocol of the Design Thinking Process—Empathize, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test—in order to view the “American Experiment” as exactly that. The colonists had reasons for wanting Independence (Empathize), they had to Define why, they had to figure out how they were going to do it (Ideate), they had to make several versions of the Constitution and organized government (Prototype), and I’d argue that all of history is an ongoing Test and adjustment based on changes in the world. How does the United States continue to maintain its core principles in a changing world?
From here, we had to discuss some core concepts of Cause & Effect. It’s impossible to discuss history in any way without these basic concepts being well understood. In teams, the students came up with examples of cause/effect in different situations as well as examples of non-correlations. This was WAY more fun than I expected; the students laughed so much at each other’s examples. Please ask them!
Our “brain break” was a “Zoom Out” exercise. I chose an image that showed “New Amsterdam” side-by-side with today’s New York City, from 1664 to the present day. I start close in and Zoom Out over 5-6 images, and the students must guess what the image is with more and more clues. This was a “brain break” but also kind of like a game that got them curious, as well as demonstrating the great change in landscape from the colonial period to the present day. They also got quite a bit of instruction on New York City as New Amsterdam and how it became an English colony.
Finally, it was on to the Stamp Act and to begin to empathize with the colonists’ concerns. We only hit the introduction of this today, with a large conversation on Taxes, and what they are. This is an extremely complex topic, and one that can be difficult for students, but they did a great job with it. We will read the Stamp Act after reviewing our Tax conversation tomorrow morning, and then discuss the various other Acts declared by George III that imposed various taxes on the colonists. Our goal is to try to understand the colonists’ long struggle to be heard by Great Britain and why they felt a revolution was needed.
I’ve attached the photo we used for the Zoom Out. Please ask them what they remember!
