Ideas for teaching kids to Seek, Discover, and Look at Michigan's History.
What it means to ‘pack the wagon’ has changed over the past couple hundred years. Today, it might mean heading to the beach with floaties and beach bags. Two hundred years ago, though, packing your wagon meant fitting as many of your belongings and as much food as you could in a covered wagon. Think [...]
When the Toledo War took place in 1835 and 1836 between Michigan and Ohio, the conflict over the Michigan-Ohio Border was already nearly fifty years old. From what essentially boils down to a misunderstanding, both Michigan and Ohio claimed a certain 468-sq-mile piece of territory, in which lies what we now know as Toledo, Ohio. In 1835, this cold conflict came to a head when Michigan and Ohio each tried to claim the territory as their own. Teach your students about what it means to be a state, and how Michigan achieved Statehood as an indirect result of the Toledo War.
Learning The Lives of Soldiers
This lesson helps students become familiar with field research projects by asking the question, Can we find information about Civil War soldiers who may have lived in your neighborhood? Through trying to answer this question, students will learn about Civil War history of their community, the soldiers who lived there, and [...]
Studying history can be difficult for students because they have no frame of reference to understand the political, economic, and social forces of the historical period. Primary documents can communicate a distinct impression of a given era. By viewing documents from a range of perspectives, levels of society, and positions of power, students are able to interpret and compose a more educated evaluation of an era.
This video describes the history of photography from its humble origins to the amazing roles it plays today. In order to understand a given era in history, we often have to consult not just textual documents, but photographic evidence as well. Certain spans of history simply cannot be grasped without photography. The [...]
Lesson plan for Michigan pioneers who worked the land.
Michigan’s pioneers—the first people of European decent to settle in various places throughout our state—wrote many accounts of their experiences.
