Ideas for teaching kids to Seek, Discover, and Look at Michigan's History.
[ January 28, 2012; 11:00 am to 4:00 pm. ] This year, our annual Statehood Day celebration honors the 175th birthday of the Great Lakes State. Come join the fun—and come early: The first 100 visitors receive a piece of birthday cake!
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 [...]
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 [...]
Learn about the life of a French voyageur and the Great Lakes fur trade as you help pack a canoe. Find out what goods were traded, how they were packed, how many men traveled in a canoe and how much weight the canoe could carry. (GLCEs: 3-H3.0.6, 3-E1.0.1, 3-E1.0.3, N.MR.03.10, P.FM.03.38)
Explore life in a lumber camp as you learn how “green gold” changed Michigan’s economy. Learn “logger’s lingo” and find products made from trees! (GLCEs: 4-H3.0.3, 4-H3.0.4, 4-H3.0.8, 4-G5.0.1, 4-E1.0.5, N.FL.04.36, M.PS.04.02)
Why do people leave their homes to move to a new place? What do they bring with them and what do they leave behind? Learn about immigrants who have come to Michigan through stories, role-playing and artifacts. (GLCEs: 4-H3.0.2, 4-G4.0.1, 4-G4.0.2, 4-C5.0.1)
Dig into Michigan’s mining heritage. Discover what it was like to work in the copper and iron mines of the Upper Peninsula. Try your hand at cookie mining. (GLCEs: 4-H3.0.3, 4-H3.0.5, 4-H3.0.8, 4-G4.0.1, 4-G4.0.2, 4-G5.0.1, 4-E1.0.1)
Thousands of Michigan citizens worked at home and abroad to help win World War II. Learn what they did and why Michigan was called “The Arsenal of Democracy.” (GLCEs: 4-H3.0.4, 4-H3.0.5, 4-C5.0.2, 4-C5.0.4)
