Pictures from America From the Great Depression to World War II in American Memory provide visual images to introduce and spark curiosity about Jacob Have I Loved by Katherine Paterson, a novel about jealousy set on an island in the Chesapeake Bay in the early 1940s.

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1. Choose photographs from America From the Great Depression to World War II, 1935-1945 and cut each into several pieces. Have enough pieces for each student.
2. Give each student a piece of a picture and tell them to find the other pieces of their photograph.
3. Students find group members who share portions of their photograph.
4. When the photo is complete, students exchange it for a whole one and examine it using the photo analysis guide.
5. Groups present their photos and their observations.
6. Each student receives a copy of the slide collection.

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• Students follow this activity with reading and discussion of Jacob Have I Loved (New York: Crowell, 1980).
  
• Students see movie of Jacob Have I Loved (Wonderworks. 1989. 57 minutes) and compare the l980s movie and its costumes with the black and white pictures from the 1930s in the collection.
  
• Students visit the Lore Oyster House at the Calvert Marine Museum in southern Maryland to see a shucking hall and tonging rakes as well as other oystering equipment and boats.
  
• Students and their teachers take pictures on their southern Maryland trip which illustrate the ways that area is similar and different today.
  
• Students look again at the slide collection and their own pictures and reflect, in writing, on the similarities and the differences.
  
• Students reading this book in the context of an interdisciplinary study of the Chesapeake Bay may be interested in following these links to further research.
  
• Students work with photographs from American Memory in a similar fashion for another book, Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred Taylor. Link to Dorothea Lange Pictures.