Lesson Ideas

Inquiry Tasks

• Story Sequencing, from Reading Rockets, encourages students to  identify the chronological components of a story — beginning, middle, and end — as they retell events in the order in which they occurred. Ask students to create a timeline of their own life, including important milestones such as when they learned to walk, talk, took a trip, or went to school. 

• Reinforce student understanding of the concept of history by engaging students in a "picture walk" of the book Presidents Day, by David Marx. Ask students to describe how the pictures look different from photographs of people today. Invite students to brainstorm a class list of differences they observe in clothing, hair, buildings, etc. in order to explain how history is a record of the past, just as photographs are records of people who lived in the past. Invite students to share an old photograph of their ancestors or a place their family used to live, as an example of the past.

• Encourage students to explore how the environment around them changes through seasons of the year, as well as over several years, due to the actions of people who use the environment for different purposes. Ask students to view a collection of Before and After photographs. How did environments in the photographs change and what might have caused such changes? Ask students to create their own "before" and "after" illustrations of a change they have noticed in their own neighborhood or community.

• Creating Timelines, from Reading Rockets, encourages students to examine how timelines can provide a visual support for remembering important events in the correct sequencing. Help students begin to explore how events might have caused others to happen. Suggest that students use a timeline template, the example My Life Timeline, or the Washington sample template to create timelines of the events in children's fiction or biography.

• I Grow, a lesson from the Utah Education Network, asks students to consider the abstract concept of time and change by comparing how they have changed from one year to the next. Challenge students to compare change over time by placing in chronological order various paintings of George Washington found in the collection I Grew, Too. Encourage students to create a mini-portrait album of themselves from crib to school, or invite family members to contribute photographs of their child, depicting growth and change over time.

   

Primary Sources 

Secondary Sources 

• I Grew, Too, illustrations and paintings of George Washington over his lifetime, for student use. 

• Helping Your Child Learn History, from the U.S. Department of Education, for teacher reference. 

• I Am George Washington, 15-minute video.

• I Am Martin Luther King, Jr.,15-minute video.

• Abe Lincoln, My First Biography, 5-minute video.