What is History? Timelines and Oral Histories
IntroductionIn this lesson, young students will
gain a frame of reference for understanding history and for recognizing that the
past is different depending on who is remembering and retelling it. They will
construct a timeline based on events from their own lives and family histories.
This will give them a visual representation of the continuity of time. They will
also be able to see that their own personal past is different in scope from their
family's past, or their country's past. Once
they understand that history is made up of many people's stories of the past,
students will explore how we know about events that occurred prior to our own
births. Each student will interview two family members about the same event, compare
the two versions, and write or dictate their own version of the story, which becomes
the "official" account. In this way, they will experience the power of both first-hand
accounts and historical documentation. Guiding Questions:What
is the past, and why is it important? How do we learn about events in the past?
How are historical accounts influenced by the biases of eyewitnesses? Learning
ObjectivesAfter completing this lesson, students
will be able to: - understand that their lifetime represents
a small piece of history
- make connections between important events in
the histories of their families and larger historical events
- take an
oral history
- compare and contrast two or more accounts of the same event
- write an account of an event which synthesizes eyewitness testimony from
two or more sources
Preparing to Teach this LessonReview
the suggested activities, then download and duplicate any online materials you
will need. If desired, you can bookmark specific web pages so that students can
access relevant online materials directly; print out required pages and duplicate
copies as necessary for student viewing. You
might want to review the following EDSITEment-reviewed resources for use in this
lesson plan:
- Great Chicago Fire and
the Web of Memory—This site provides several eyewitness accounts of the same
event - the great Chicago fire. The three perspectives on the O'Leary legend provide
a great opportunity to explore the similarities and differences between two accounts
as well as the written report, which became the official historical account.
- Internet
Public Library
- Digital
Classroom—This site has a special section for children that includes primary
sources and a particularly good timeline, which spans the length of Herbert Hoover's
life, but also includes interesting events from the time period.
Suggested
Activities 1. What is History? 2.
Class Timeline 3. Oral Histories
4. I'm an Historian 1
What is History? Listening to the contributions
of several students and writing things in chronological order during this lesson
will help students to build a foundation for later activities. Explain that the
past means things that have already happened. Ask someone to tell an event from
yesterday's history. Next, ask students to relate events from last year. Once
all students seem to understand the meaning of "the past," ask for a few students
to tell an event from when they were babies. Do they remember these events? If
not, how do they know about them? Refer back
to the events from yesterday that have been listed. Just as the class has a history,
each family also has an important history made up of events from the past. Have
students brainstorm some events in their families’ histories. Examples might
include births, deaths, marriages, immigrations, graduations, vacations, bar/bat
mitzvahs, adoptions, moves, opening of a family business, etc. Be sure to reinforce
that every family is different, and therefore, every family will have different
events in its past that make up its history. Demonstrate
a timeline using events from your own family history. Write the events and the
dates and have the students help you put them in chronological order. You might
also want to show the children timelines available through The Internet Public Library. The timelines are divided into several time
periods in history and include mostly political events such as presidential inaugurations,
beginnings and ends of wars, and states joining the Union. Working in conjunction
with someone at home, each child should create a family timeline that contains
5-7 events from his/her own family history. Young students can have an adult scribe
for them, but they should be familiar with the events that are included on their
timeline. 2 Class Timeline Prior
to this lesson, you will need to collect all of the family timelines to determine
the oldest event and prepare your class timeline. On a roll of butcher paper,
create the timeline by marking the years at uniform intervals 8-12 inches apart,
depending on how many events you have and how many years you need to include.
A physically long timeline will help students to understand the distant events,
but it still needs to be manageable. Have
each student briefly share his/her timeline with the class. Point out the differences
between families and the events that they chose to include. Ask questions that
will help the children put time in perspective such as "Who has an event that
happened this year? Who has an event that happened before they were born? I was
born in ____; who has an event that happened before I was born?" You might also
have the children line up in chronological order based on the oldest event on
their timelines. Show the children the timeline
you have prepared. Depending on the size, it may be necessary to take it into
the hallway or gymnasium to roll it out. Explain that while one important event
is happening for one family, a different event may be happening at the same time
to another family. We will put all of our events on this one timeline so that
we can see how they are all related. One at a time, have students stand on a year
that is on their timelines. With a marker, add each event to the timeline. In
order to add a wider perspective, you might want to include events from the larger
world on your timeline. The EDSITEment-reviewed resource Internet
Public Library has a link to This
Day in History. You can find events for any day and
search under categories such as entertainment, crime, or general interest, or
by time periods such as Civil War and Cold War. Students might enjoy finding an
event that occurred on their birthday or other important date from their timeline.
Once all the events are on the timeline, help
students make visual comparisons of events as follows. Have a student walk the
timeline to look for patterns, then have a student stand at the "present" end
of the timeline and make an observation. For example, "We were all born pretty
close together, but our parents were born at many different times." Students can
visually "see" the past on this timeline. If they stand at the end of the timeline—the
present—they can see that all the events in their lifetime are close to where
they stand, but events such as the birth of a parent, or the year a grandparent
immigrated to this country, are far away. 3
Oral Histories In this lesson, students
will explore how the stories that comprise our history are developed. They will
learn about primary documents through interviews of family members about an historical
event. To prepare students for taking oral histories, you might want to visit
the EDSITEment-reviewed resource Do History, which includes guidelines for taking oral histories. Students
will be asked to interview two family members about the same event. Some examples
include: - Ask two family members who were present about the day you
were born or adopted;
- Interview both your father and your grandmother
about their memories of your father's bar mitzvah or confirmation;
- Ask
your mother and your aunt to describe their first day of school.
Think
about the events that students included on their timelines to develop more examples.
Keep in mind that events from diverse cultures will help students broaden their
understanding of the scope of history. Students may want to tape record their
interviews if possible, though distance may require them to conduct such interviews
over the phone or email. Students should then fill out the following Versions
of History chart, provided in pdf format (younger students may need help writing).
With worksheets in front of them, students
will be ready to take part in a class discussion about what they learned. Begin
by asking if anyone was surprised by the differences in the two stories that they
heard. Why might the stories be different? Some possibilities are that each person
remembers different details, or that certain parts of the story were more important
to one person than to the other. Also discuss
stories that are very similar. Why aren't there many differences in the two accounts?
Perhaps it is a recent event and the two people have not forgotten many details.
Perhaps one person's memory is affected by hearing the story from the other person.
(For example, if a student were to interview her brother and her mother about
her brother's first day of school. Are her brother's memories genuine, or are
they formed by hearing the story from her mother?) What does this tell us about
history? How do history books get written? The work of an historian is to gather
information from many places, including primary sources, and to create an official
written account. 4 I'm
an Historian In the previous lesson, students
learned how "official" historical accounts are written. In this lesson, they will
write or dictate the official account of the events from their interviews. Students
will be required to synthesize information from multiple sources in this lesson.
If this is a new skill, it may be necessary to pre-teach it. This can be done
as a class by comparing two different versions of a familiar story such as "Little
Red Riding Hood" and completing a Venn
diagram (you can use the downloadable Venn diagram provided in pdf format)
to find the overlapping and disparate elements of the two accounts. Finally, as
a class you can write an "official" account using elements from the two versions.
Use the EDSITEment-reviewed resource The
Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory to explore first-hand accounts and
official written history. Under "Web
of Memory" and "O'Leary
Legend," you will find three documents: a transcript from the inquiry into
the fire, the official report on the fire, and a poem written about the fire.
Read the transcript to the students first. Then read the official account. Discuss
details in the official account that did not appear in the transcript. Have students
complete the Transcript and
Report Venn diagram, as a class or in small groups. Help the children to understand
that many people were interviewed about the incident, and that the information
from all of these accounts was written into an official report. Using this as
an example, students should synthesize the two accounts they have of their historical
events to dictate or write the "official" account. You may also want to read stories of America's children from America's beginnings to 1860, and after 1860,
available through the EDSITEment-reviewed resource Digital History, or "Eyewitness—History
through the eyes of those who lived it," available through the EDSITEment-reviewed
resource Internet Public Library in the Kidspace
section.
Selected EDSITEment Websites
Standards Alignment
View your state’s standards
|