IEFA Resources at the Library of Congress

 Looking for more primary sources or want to get your students doing research? 

Montana Historical Society Historian Melissa Hibbard, who is also the co-director of National History Day in Montana, put together some useful guides for searching for IEFA-related materials available online from the Library of Congress. 

• Searching for Images in the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog

• Library of Congress IEFA Primary Source Sets & Research Guides

• Chronicling America: Researching Indian Boarding Schools (This has useful advice for searching any topic, but it uses Indian boarding schools as an example.)

Happy searching!

P.S. Don't forget to register for our LAST Tuesday Professional Development session, April 8 from 4:30-5:30 p.m.: Teaching Thematically, with Cynthia Wilondek.

P.P.S. The deadline to join the Teacher Leader in History program is April 7. Learn more about the program and find a link to apply here. 

Teaching with Primary Sources

 Colleague and co-director of National History Day in Montana Melissa Hibbard recently shared an interesting post from Facing History & Ourselves: Six Ways to Teach with Primary Sources.

I'd argue that primary sources are what bring history to life by allowing students to touch part of the past. Primary sources can also build empathy, and they are excellent for teaching students to think critically and to consider how creators' perspectives shape sources, something all citizens need to know.

It's worth clicking through to read the whole article, which offers links and information about

• Using a Document Analysis Form, a graphic organizer that walk students through questions to determine the text's bias and perspective. (Their form is similar to, but not exactly the same as, the National Archives'. I'd be interested in knowing if one works better for your students than the other and why, if anyone is willing to perform that experiment.)
• A strategy for analyzing and paraphrasing sources, which teaches students to take notes and "address the validity of evidence, the perspective of the source and their own interpretation."
• A strategy for analyzing images. (I'm a VTS devotee, but It's always good to have another tool in your toolbox!) 
• See, Think, Wonder, the simple but surprisingly useful tool to get students to "slow down their thinking and simply observe before drawing conclusions and asking questions."
• S-I-T: Surprising, Interesting, Troubling, a strategy that gets students to engage in material. 

• AncestryClassroom, a free tool for teachers that makes "billions of historical records...available to educators and students, along with resources for the classroom and professional learning."  

Mark Johnson to Lead Our January PD

We're taking December off from Social Studies Second Tuesdays, but I hope you'll join us on January 14 from 4:30-5:30 p.m. for Teaching Montana's Chinese History, with Mark Johnson, the author of Middle Kingdom under the Big Sky and Associate Clinical Professor at Notre Dame's Alliance for Catholic Education. Mark is a powerful presenter who is eager to share why it's important to include the history of Chinese immigration in your curriculum and introduce new lessons for teaching about the Chinese in Montana. Attendees will earn one renewal unit. Register.

 

 

Teaching with Primary Sources and Summer Workshops

Using Primary Sources to Foster Difficult Dialogues

The article Using Primary Sources to Foster Difficult Dialogues  - Journal of Folklore and Education focuses on the Tulsa Race Riot--but it also includes in its "classroom connections/lesson plans" a unit on Indian boarding schools. The lesson "explores primary source material related to the history of federally controlled Native American Boarding Schools. By evaluating various documented points of view related to this history, students will engage in critical thinking, close listening, and media literacy skills." Among the sources is a letter in the September 7, 1890, Helena Independent. "Flathead Kindergarten" describes Indian agent Peter Ronan's scheme to take very young students into an on-reservation boarding school:

"The children, if taken into school at the age of two or three or four years, and kept there, only occasionally visited by their parents, will, when grown up, know nothing of Indian ways and habits. They will be thoroughly, though imperceptibly, formed to the ways of the whites in their habits, their thoughts and their aspirations. They will not know, in fact, be completely ignorant of the Indian language and will know only English. One generation will accomplish what the past system would require generations to effect.... Never having tasted of the roaming, free-and-easy-going lazy life of the old Indians, and not having been spoiled by the indulgence of parents, or near relatives..." 

I think that this heart-breaking source is worth analyzing and using to work with students to evaluate points of view, but I wish that the lesson included more Indigenous perspectives. You can find a few Indigenous sources on boarding schools and several on other topics in this Indigenous Primary Source spreadsheet that MTHS Teacher Leaders created in 2023. If you have sources you think should be added, please send them to me! I also recommend looking at the lesson plans created by the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition for contemporary Indigenous perspectives on Indian boarding schools.  

Summer Workshops 

MTHS is offering three workshops in June, in Missoula, Great Falls, and Helena. All workshops are free, and attendees can earn 6 OPI Renewal Units. A limited number of travel scholarships are available for the workshops in Helena and Missoula, which focus on literacy and social studies. Learn more here.

Before We Say Farewell for the Summer

If you are moving to a new school, don't forget to re-subscribe to Teaching Montana History with your new email address!

Please share your favorite Montana history/IEFA activity, resource or lesson and let us know how we can improve this newsletter and our other offerings by taking this survey. There are prizes for the fifteenth, thirty-first, and forty-second respondents.

Art and Primary Sources

 Retired Billings elementary school librarian Ruth Ferris recently shared this website from the University of the Arts on teaching with primary sources.

The TPS-UArts downloadable Teacher Resource Guides cover a range of arts-based topics and historical contexts. The guides are designed to help K-12 teachers incorporate arts-based primary resources into dynamic, cross-curricular classroom experiences. Each guide includes hands-on classroom projects, discussion prompts, and examples of ways to use the guides with Common Core Standards and National Core Arts Standards.

I was particularly intrigued by 

• The Power of the Poster: Connecting WPA Posters from the Library of Congress to Local Collections, 
• Igniting Inquiry: Using Compelling Arts-based Primary Sources to Inspire Student Writing Across Disciplines,
• Amplifying Our Voices Through Music, and
• The City as a Primary Source: Connecting Historical Primary Sources and the City (even though the city they focus on is Philadelphia, I think the projects are interesting.)

Do you have a great lesson plan/resource you think is worth sharing? Send it my way! 

P.S. For art as a primary-source lessons closer to home, check out the Montana Historical Society's Integrating Art and History Lesson Plans. 

 

Find the historic photos you want online

 The Montana History Portal is both incredible and intimidating. Incredible because there are so many digitized resources available on the site. And intimidating for the same reason: the sheer quantity of resources can make it difficult to find things. 

Here are a few hacks for making the site more manageable as well as cool things you might have missed if you've given up on the site. 

1. Adventure Lab

The Montana History Portal teamed up with Geochaching Adventure Lab to create walking tours/scavenger hunts of historic Montana places. Adventure Lab is a free-to-use mobile app that allows users to roam locations using GPS coordinates to make their way to specific locations. Can't make it to a particular site? The tours (including some present-day street views) are also posted on the Portal in the Places exhibits Page. The Adventure Lab entries all have "A Walking Tour" as the subtitle, but there are exhibits of other places too (for example, check out this exhibit of the construction of Hungry Horse Dam). 

2. Exhibits

These online exhibits are basically small, curated sets focused on particular people, places, and events.  I've already mentioned the Places exhibits above. The People exhibits include exhibits on topics as varied as eastern Montana photographer L. A. Huffman and the 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps. These African American soldiers were tasked with testing if bicycles could serve the military as a substitute for horses. (Spoiler alert: They could not.) 

Events exhibits include Montana floods and the 1972 Montana constitutional convention. 

Possibly the most useful exhibits are included under Research Guides and Teacher Resources. These exhibits include not only text and images, but also guiding questions. Check out this one on logging!

3. Find What You Want by Narrowing Your Search

Many people hit the Montana History Portal home page, type a search term where it says "Search Our Database," and then throw up their hands when the Portal comes back with a huge list of (often unrelated) items. Don't let this be you.

Instead, narrow by item type (e.g., image, for photographs) and (if relevant) by date range and additional keywords. Here's an example:

I'm interested in finding pictures of women homesteaders. Typing in the word "Homestead" gets me 3,657 results, including many pages of Evelyn Cameron's diaries, in which she used the word. Narrowing it by “Image” gets me 391 results. Narrowing it by “Date” (I chose January 1, 1909, to January 1, 1919--the height of the homesteading boom) results in 184 images. That's still too many for me, so I'm going to click on "Refine Search Terms" and add a keyword: "women" and "Update Search". Sixteen results found. Now that's manageable.

Note: Starting with the phrase "women homesteader" and narrowing it by image only got me two pictures. That's why I always start with one word in the main search box and then use the "Refine Search Terms" button to add keywords. 

One last note: Don't be afraid to play around with search terms. I would have gotten different (maybe better) results if I had used the word "homesteader" or "farm" instead of "homestead" or "woman" instead of "women."

4. Browse (or Search) Specific Collections

Want your students to find a photo to use as a prompt for a story, to create a meme, or create an exhibit? Interested in having them explore a particular topic or the work of a particular artist or photographer? Consider having them browse specific collections.

This just got easier. The Montana Historical Society has posted over 11,000 images and counting on the Portal. Until recently, all of these photos were maintained in a single large collection on the Portal. Now many are broken out into smaller collections of significance to make it easier for you to find the images you are looking for. The five new collections are:

• Bud Lake and Randy Brewer Crow Indian Photograph Collection (over a thousand images, mostly documenting people, places, work, and regalia of the Apsáalooke [Crow] Nation.)
• Evelyn J. Cameron Photograph Collection (660 photos by Evelyn Cameron, who moved to Terry, Montana in 1893 and helped support herself and her naturalist husband with a photography business.)
• Haynes Foundation Photograph Collection (a massive, and still growing collection of photographs by F. Jay Haynes, the official photographer of the Northern Pacific Railroad, who also established the first photo concession in Yellowstone National Park, and his son Jack, who inherited the Yellowstone photo business.) 
• Henry B. Syverud Scrapbooks Photograph Collection (over 1,500 images taken by Henry Syverud of his friends and neighbors in northeastern Montana between 1909 and 1965).
• L. A. Huffman Photograph Collection (740 images of eastern Montana, especially the Miles City area, taken between 1879 and 1931.)

Want to search within these collections? Type the collection name in the main search engine, select the "Search For" button, and choose "Exact Phrase." Then, after your initial search, chose the "Refine Search Terms" button to add or restrict keywords.

A Little of This and A Little of That

 No theme this time--just cool stuff, ideas, and opportunities.

Present at MFPE

Do you have a strategy, lesson, or resource that you think is worth sharing with other teachers? I bet you do! MFPE is accepting applications to present at the 2023 MFPE Educator Conference in Billings, October 19-20. The Social Studies strand of this conference is only as strong as we make it--and I'd like your help making it spectacular. Apply to present! 

Read All About It!

The first batch of newspapers from MTHS's latest cycle of the National Digital Newspaper Program are now online on the Chronicling America site! This batch includes three papers out of Browning, with issues from 1939 to 1963: 

• Glacier County Chief, 1939-1940 
• Browning Chief, 1941-1953 
• The Glacier Reporter, 1953-1963.

Need a reminder of how cool and pedagogically useful digitized newspapers are? Check out these past posts. 

Billings Public Library Community Archive Project

This spring, Billings Public Library is launching a program to collect photos of Billings from the 1960s to the 1990s. The Library has already partnered with the Montana History Portal (formerly known as Montana Memory Project) to digitize hundreds of historic photos and documents; this new program will look to fill in the gap of the later 20th century. Images will be displayed at the Library, with selected images uploaded to the Portal. Check out the details of this exciting new program, then think--could you and your students cooperate with a public library in your own community to do something similar? 

Apply to Become a Teacher Leader

Middle school teachers! If you love Montana history and want to share your passion with colleagues, consider applying to become a Teacher Leader in Montana History. Find out more here. Applications are due April 23.   

Last Chance to Participate in History Unfolded

History Unfolded is a project organized by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. It recruits citizen historians (including students!) to search digitized newspapers to uncover what ordinary people around the country could have known about the Holocaust from reading their local newspapers in the years 1933–1945. The project has been going on for several years, and will end this spring. Participants can gain free access to newspapers.com on March 27-April 2, April 17-23, and May 15-21. (This makes the task much easier!) There are classroom resources for teachers if you want to register your class. Learn more.   

New Name, Even More Great Primary Sources

 The Montana Memory Project has changed its name. It's now the Montana History Portal. It's changed its look and its interface, too. I haven't spent much time on the new site, but director Jennifer Birnel says it's an improvement. She's particularly excited about 

• the new top menu, which will make it easier to navigate to the Collections, Contributors, and Exhibits pages from anywhere in the site, and
• the new Featured Items section, which will provide easy access to new collections and digital exhibits.

Don't forget to submit your student stories to the Montana History Portal's Third Annual Historical Picture Prompt contest. (The deadline to enter is March 17, 2023.) Learn more here.

And stay tuned for information about their annual Meme-ory Contest, which usually takes place in May. Here are last year's winners in the age 10-18 category, the age 19-40 category, and the age 41-120 category.

Looking for inspiration on how to use primary sources with your students? Here are some past posts that address this issue.

P.S. Don't forget to register for our last online PD, March 13, 4:00 p.m.-5:00 p.m.: Integrating Montana History across Disciplines, led by Teacher Leader in Montana History Cynthia Wilondek

 

 

Glenn Wiebe's Hacks for Teaching with Primary Sources

A few weeks ago, I wrote about where to find primary sources relating to Montana history and provided a few ideas about how to incorporate them into your classrooms. 

In that post, I *should* have included a link to this post by my favorite social studies education blogger, Glenn Wiebe. But I forgot to--so now it gets its very own feature.

You'll want to scroll past the part where he talks about Kansas's state standards to the very first bit of bold. That's where the good stuff is. To encourage you to read his entire blog, I'll list the hacks here--but you'll need to go visit Glenn's site to get the whys, hows, and what fors as well as specific strategies and suggestions to get you started.

Hack one: Start with a clear end in mind.

Hack Two: Create a hook, generate some intrigue, ask for predictions, develop a cliffhanger.

Hack Three: Use interesting and provocative primary sources. 

Hack Four: Tamper with history just a little bit. As in . . . modify the sources (especially the textual ones) to make them more accessible for your students.

Hack Five: Turn your kids loose with your compelling question that aligns to your hook activity.

Glenn's got examples. He's got activity suggestions. If you want to improve your use of primary sources, hop over to his blog and read this post. 

 

Finding and Using Primary Sources

 One question I'm often asked is "where can I find good primary sources?" Nationally, my first stops are the Library of Congress, the National Archives, and Digital Public Library of America, all of which have exhibits, curated primary source sets, and educator resources to make it easier to find useful material. For Montana, my first recommendation is always the Montana Memory Project, the Montana Historical Society, digitized newspapers, and your local museum, archives, or historical society.  

Montana Memory Project Exhibits

The Montana Memory Project has a huge number of sources--so many that it can be overwhelming. To make it easier for educators to find material, it gathered a group of classroom teachers to create primary source sets. Many of these sets are now posted on their exhibit page. Its own staff has also been creating exhibits, all of which include selected primary sources on a particular topic along with a little bit of contextual narrative. Here are a few titles that caught my eye, but there are many more--and still more being added on the Memory Project's Exhibit Page.

• Bicycles for the Army: The 25th Infantry in Montana
• Construction of the Hungry Horse Dam
• Early Schools in Montana
• Hell or High Water: Floods in Montana
• Logging History in Montana

MTHS Annotated Resource Sets

A few years ago, we created eleven annotated resource sets that include links to photographs, maps, illustrations, and documents relating to Montana history topics from the gold rush and homesteading to World War I and the Great Depression. Many, but not all, of the images linked in these sets were also used to illustrate the textbook Montana: Stories of the Land. We didn't create a set for every chapter, but we did for most of the most popular ones. 

Digitized Newspapers

My colleague, reference librarian Zoe Ann Stolz, likes to say that historic newspapers are the closest thing we have to a time machine. The Montana Historical Society has digitized over a million newspaper pages from over 230 newspapers. These papers are on two different sites: Montana Newspapers and Chronicling America. (There is no overlap between sites so you have so search both.) 

Using Primary Sources

How do you use these sources? An old article published by the Library of Congress (no longer online) suggested four types of activities: Focus, Inquiry, Application, and Assessment.  

Here are a few ideas that could fall into these broader categories:

• Build PowerPoints
• Create DBQs 
• Analyze them using a primary source analysis tool from the National Archives or Library of Congress
• Create Historical Assessments of Thinking
• Create a Question Focus
• Get a feel for what it was like back then (one of my favorite exercises is to have students shop the ads in historic newspapers during a specific time period).

But I'd love to hear more from you! What are YOUR favorite ways to use primary sources? 

P.S. No one has time to build every lesson from scratch. Check out some of our plug-and-play primary-source based lesson plans.

Learning from Historical Document Units

If you teach Montana history, I hope you use the Learning from istorical Document Units we've created to accompany almost every chapter of the textbook, Montana: Stories of the Land.  These units provide excerpts of primary sources, such as

• 1863 letter from Bannack" 
• 1865 letter from Chief Victor 
• letters from drought stricken farmers in the 1930s to 
• Testimony from Hum Fay concerning the Boycott of Chinese and Japanese Businesses in Butte
• a diary of a 1916 car trip from Seattle to Boston, and 
• Constitutional Convention Delegate Virginia Blend's Testimony before the Bill of Rights Committee, 1972.

Each unit includes a link to the typed excerpt (to make it easy for students to read), a link to a Document Analysis Worksheet created by the National Archives, and a link to the actual document. That last link has been broken ever since the Montana Memory Project migration to its new platform. But no longer! Letters, Diaries, and Documents from the Montana Historical Society (which is the collection that most of these documents were a part of) have now been uploaded to the new site. There are still four documents that are part of other collections that haven't been uploaded, but for the most part, the links are now good!

Speaking of the new Montana Memory Project site, I hope you'll check it out if you haven't already. I find it easier to navigate than the old site IF I follow these three tips:

1. Use the drop down menus to narrow your search by format (e.g., image, map, document, etc.).

2. Use the "Search for" drop down menu to select "exact phrase" when searching for a phrase, for example "Evelyn Cameron". 

3. Use the refine search term button to add or restrict keywords after the original search. 

I also highly recommend registering for a free account, so you can save things in your own personal collection.

Happy searching!

Montana Memory Project Photo Prompt Contest

 The Montana Memory Project is hosting the 2nd Annual Photo Prompt contest. Using any photo in the MMP collection participants will write a short story (650 words or less) and submit it to the MMP. Winners will be chosen from grades 3-6, grades 7-12, and adult.

The deadline to enter is March 11, 2022. 

Where to begin?

Browse the photo collection to find an interesting photo. Once you've found an image save the link to that image - you'll need it when submitting your story. 

If the entire collection is too overwhelming try one of these smaller collections:

Ice and Snow

Photos with animals

Photos of people 

How to Enter

Write a short story based on the photo (650 words or less). Email your entry to the Montana Memory
Project (mmp@mt.gov) with the subject line
Photo Prompt Writing Contest. In the message include your full name, age group category and link to the image.
.
Photos and stories will be highlighted on MMP social media accounts.

There are prizes (including publication in Distinctly Montana)!

 

Primary Sources are grrrrrreat!

 Over the ten plus years I've been writing Teaching Montana History and putting my stuff up on my blog, I've written 91 posts on teaching with primary sources. And I figure it's time for post 92. That's how much I love primary sources. 

The Montana Memory Project is the go-to place for finding primary sources relating to Montana history. It recently moved to a new platform, with, I'm told, better functionality. Jennifer Birnel, head of the Montana Memory Project is going to join us on December 8 from 4 p.m.-5 p.m. to offer a tour of the new platform and searching tips. Register here before December 7 to receive a link to the Zoom meeting. 

Looking for tips about how to use primary sources in your classroom. Check out this the Digital Library of America's 10 Ways to Use the Primary Source Sets in Your Classroom. Then spend some time surfing the DPLA's collection, which is remarkably broad. 

The National Archives explains why using primary sources is so powerful in History in the Raw. The National Archives also has some great activities on DocsTeach, including this one that starts with an anti-Chinese boycott poster from Butte. 

EIU Teaching with Primary Sources also talks about the "why" (exposing students to multiple perspectives; helping them develop critical thinking skills and empathy for the human condition; and helping students understand that all history is local) as well as offering tips on how to choose and cite primary sources.  

Of course, the mother ship for primary sources is the Library of Congress. I recommend looking first at the Library of Congress Primary Source Sets.  

I also love, love, love digitized newspapers--you can find many on Chronicling America, a Library of Congress site, and even more from Montana on MontanaNewspapers.Org. 

Finally, William Madison Randall Library also lists several online repositories--you'll need to scroll to the bottom of the page.  

 Happy surfing!

EVERYBODY loves historic newspapers

Digitized Newspapers

I am always excited when my coworker Natasha Hollenbach tells me that she's completed uploading new newspapers to Montana Newspapers or Chronicling America. The newest additions to Montana Newspapers bring the total of free digitized pages available to over 1.15 million!

New titles/available date ranges include:

• Belt Valley Times from 1964 to 1977.
• The River Press (Fort Benton) up through 2010.
• The Poplar Shopper from 1970 to 2001 (the full run) 
• The Char-Koosta News from 1985 to 2014
• And 656 pages of 5 newspapers from Castle (all that remain): The Castle Mining Reporter, The Castle News, Castle Reporter, Castle Tribune, and The Whole Truth.

Click here for a map of all the newspapers digitized by the Montana Historical Society. Click here to access them. And click here for ideas on how to use the digitized newspapers with students.

End of Year Survey

Don't forget to complete the year-end survey. You might win a prize. You will certainly enjoy that good feeling of helping out your fellow teachers by providing feedback to make Teaching Montana History better and especially by sharing a favorite resource/go-to lesson. 

 

What was Helena like in 1887?

Last December, I shared Homer Thomas's description of Christmas in the Gallatin Valley in 1864. Readers seemed to enjoy it so I thought I'd share an excerpt of another delightful primary source, this one a description of Helena published in the the September 1887 issue of Northwest Magazine. Likely written as a promotional piece (so to be read with some caution), it was called "A Glance at the City."

"Let us suppose that you arrive in Helena on the train from the East just at the close of a summer day. The bustle at the station, the long lines of freight cars, the array of hacks and hotel omnibusses, all suggest a large and busy place. You select as your conveyance a brightly-painted streetcar, which takes you "up town" for ten cents, and glancing around at the warehouses, lumber-yards, taverns and saloons which gather about the station, discover that this is a new suburb, created by the railroad, and that the city proper is more than a mile away hugging closely the base of the mountains. In the intervening space you pass heaps of boulders and gravel, beds of old ditches and huge excavations scarring the face of the landscape--the remains of abandoned gold-diggings. The best of the placer ground was long ago washed out, but at one point there is still a line of sluice-boxes and some work is done when water is plenty. ... All this debris of the old mines gives to the approaches to the city a singularly ragged and uncouth look and makes the contrast a striking one, when the car, turning and descending a little hill, suddenly brings you into a long, narrow, winding street, full of vehicles and people and bordered with a picturesque variety of buildings, ranging in size from the log huts to the four story brick hotel and the cut-stone palace of a bank. ..."

Let me know if you like these occasional primary source features, or if I should stick to sharing teaching resources, strategies, and professional development opportunities.

Teaching Montana History is written by Martha Kohl, Outreach and Interpretation Historian at the Montana Historical Society.

Spirit Reading

Confederated Salish and Kootenai College education professor Tammy Elser recently introduced me to a reading strategy that she called Spirit Reading. (She credits Mary Jo Swartly, an extraordinary teacher and educational consultant, for introducing the technique to her, which she says has been published and used by many notable educators.) 

Spirit Reading has nothing to do with ghosts and everything to do with honing in on the spirit of a piece of writing. Here's how it works:

1. Give students a document about a page long. Have them read it to themselves silently.
2. Then, give them a focus question/something to look for and have them read it through a second time, highlighting three to four key words or phrases.
3. Arrange chairs in a circle, and have students take turns reading their phrases in random order. Students should just chime in whenever there's a space. It's okay if students have chosen the same words or phrases (the repetition is part of what gives this activity its spirit.)
4. After everyone has read all of his or her words and phrases, compliment your students: Tell them that what they created was like a poem, bringing out the essence of the piece.
5. Then have students write for two minutes about how the exercise changed their experience with, or understanding of, the document.
6. Finally, discuss the document, reflecting on new understandings you've gained about the piece of writing.

Tammy has done this with the Fort Laramie Treaty (the focus question was "What did the Indians get?") and Thurgood Marshall's decision in Brown v Board of Education, which overturned "separate but equal" in education. 

We talked about using the strategy with an excerpt of an Indian boarding school narrative, with "what are the author's emotions" as the focus question. We also talked about using it with this 1921 letter from Shelby attorney to Governor Joseph M. Dixon describing the plight of drought-stricken farmers in his community with the focus question being "what's the problem and what's the solution?" (Tammy suggested that students could be given two different color highlighters, one for words and phrases relating to the problem and the other for words and phrases relating to the solution and, during the read, the teacher could ask students to alternate reading words/phrases relating to the problem and words/phrases relating to the solution.) 

Tammy notes: the key piece of this technique "is repeated reading for unique purposes of a complex text and the social construction of knowledge created by hearing the impressions of others.  There are dozens of ways teachers can vary this activity."

If you try this in your class, especially with a text relating to Montana history, drop me a line. I'd love to hear how it went. 

P.S. I've summarized some of the other strategies Tammy introduced me to in Struggling Readers and Informational Text so there's more for those who want it.

P.P.S. I'm still looking for 4-6 grade teachers to test Montana and the Twentieth Century, which integrates ELA and uses several Tammy Elser-approved strategies to teach about homesteading, boarding schools, allotment, post-1920 immigration to Montana and the 1972 Montana State Constitution. Interested? Email me!

 

Santa Claus Didn't Come to the Gallatin Valley in 1864

It's easy to get caught up in the daily grind and forget how cool history is. That's why, as we approach winter break, I want to share with you a few excerpts from a letter that eight-year-old Homer Thomas wrote on December 17, 1864, from the Gallatin Valley to his grandmother Isabella Thomas in Belleville, Illinois. Just for the sheer fun of it. 

Here's Homer describing Virginia City: 

It’s a very poor city—it is more than half as big as Belleville, and crowded with old ox wagons—You don’t see any nice horse teams & buggies like you see at home & most of the men are dressed in old dirty & ragged clothes; they do not look nice, like at home. I wish I was back to get some of your good things to eat, & so I could have some apples & cider—there is not any out here in this mountain country. Still I have had some nice antelope, deer and elk meet. I think elk is the best of all, and there is some big bears out here too, but we have not killed any, but some of the hunters kill them.

 And here he writes about their new home and his new friend:

We did not stay very long at Virginia City. Father took a notion to go down into the Gallatin Valley and take up a ranch. That is what we used to call a farm at home. So we come down and father bought a nice place, and we built a good log cabbin, & father put a floor in it, too. I tell you we got a good cabbin. There are not any of them got floors but ours and Mr. Thorp’s, and he just put his in today. He lives right close to us, about a quarter of a mile below. and has got a little boy about my size, and we have fun now with our sleds, pulling them through the snow—

And then there's Christmas: 

Well Grandmother it is pretty near Christmas time and I don’t expect to get many things this year, for it is not like home, because old Santa Claus do not come out here to give children things, because he thinks all the children too smart to come to this old place.

Well, I can do without any nice toys this year, but I want you to save me some nice things so I can have them when I come back home, I tell you Georgie has grown might fast, & is getting pretty big now. He can almost say everything. He says “I want to go GanMa’s & get some cake.” He don’t know anything about apples, or I bet he would want some of them, too. …

  And more about their cabin--and his desire to move back to Illinois:

We built our house out of cottonwood logs. Well, Granma they build houses funny out here, they put poles or kind of rails on the top, then mix mud & put over them, then they put about three or four inches of dry dirt upon that & it makes a mighty warm roof, that is the way they build houses out in this country. I tell you a person learns a good many things by coming out in this country. I expect this will be a great country some day, but I don’t care for that, just as soon as I can get enough gold, I bet you I am coming back, for I think I have learned enough of this country to last me, for a while anyhow…  

The letter is in the Montana Historical Society Archives SC837. If you want a PDF of it in its entirety, email me and I'll send the typescript. Happy solstice and Merry Christmas to all who celebrate. 

P.S. And for something completely different, check out these puppets singing Christmas carols in Pikuni (Blackfeet), courtesy of Browning Public Schools. 

 

Teaching with Primary Sources and Integrating History and ELA

Integrating History and ELA

If you are interested in using history to illuminate literature, or literature to illuminate history, I hope you'll join us for our upcoming PD, "Integrating Montana History into English Language Arts," on November 17, from 4:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. One OPI Renewal unit will be available to attendees. And to help me prepare for the session, let me know: what novels do you teach that you'd like to relate to Montana history? 

This is the third in a series of online professional developments, which are designed to provide an opportunity for teachers to share their best ideas with one another.  

Teaching with Primary Sources

There was good conversation and useful material shared in the second of the series, "Primary Sources for Teaching Montana History," so much so that I thought I'd share some of my notes below.  

Two truths and a lie is a technique Red Lodge teacher Steven Morris (middle school social studies) sometimes uses as a bell ringer about whatever subject matter he's presenting. He presents two true statements and one lie and asks students to figure out which is which. Students love it, and we talked about how that could be used with primary sources. I immediately thought about how Phil Leonardi used to ask his students to fact check homesteading promotional brochures. (Although many of those brochures were created by the railroads, my favorite is actually the delusional booklet printed by the Ryegate Weekly Reporter, which boasted that the area's annual rainfall was 22 inches.)   

Missoula teacher Betty Bennett (high school English) uses conflicting newspaper accounts/editorials about the Marias Massacre from Montana newspapers and eastern newspapers to look at differences of reporting. You can find an excerpt of “Sheridan and the Indians,” Journal of the Anti-Slavery Society [from the New York Evening Post], March 19, 1870 (which thinks the massacre was an outrage) and an excerpt from H. N. McGuire, "The Happy Result of Col. Baker’s Piegan Campaign," The Pick and Plow (Bozeman, Montana), July 29, 1870, 2 (which supports Baker's actions) in our lesson plan "Blood on the Marias: Understanding Different Points of View Related to the Baker Massacre of 1870."

Billings elementary librarian Ruth Ferris taught us how to do a picture reveal using Google slides (with students asking yes or no questions in order to reveal a photograph). She also talked about using a dice game to have students answer questions about a source. (For example: if you roll 1, you have to write down when it was created.) You can find her instructions here.  

Everyone was very excited about Lewistown middle school teacher Noah Vallincourt's use of primary sources and role playing to teach about immigration and Ellis Island. (He assigns students characters and uses photos and other material to simulate coming arriving on Ellis Island, and trying to pass through the medical exam. 

Billings middle school librarian Kathi Hoyt shared several techniques. My favorite were playing "I Spy" in a complicated image and character annotation: 

• Find a historical photograph of a person or event and make a copy for each student
• Have students collect information about the person (or event)
• Have students annotate around and/or on the photograph to share the information they collected.

On the left is an example Kathi shared with us and uses as a model for students. It was created by Crow artist Wendy Red Star on a photo of Chief Plenty Coups in the Library of Congress Collection. (You can see and learn more of Red Star's work here.)    

I shared our new Annotated Resource Sets and narrated PowerPoints of primary sources, as well as resources available via the Montana Memory Project's Educational Resources page (did you know that in addition to online exhibits on Indian leaders and boarding schools, they also had PowerPoints of pictures from every Montana tribe)?

We all agreed that when it came to primary sources, it was important to curate the sources and that oftentimes less was more.

 If this were minutes from a turn-of-the-century woman's club meeting, I'd end with "delicious refreshments were served," but alas, it was a virtual gathering. Until we can actually meet again in person, I look forward to reconvening on Zoom on November 17. See you there?

P.S. Have you voted yet? If not, head to the polls. They are open until 8:00 p.m. Find your polling place here. 

Primary Sources and Montana History

Last summer, I asked a few Montana history teachers what would make their teaching life easier (especially if they were presenting some or all of their lessons virtually.) They requested two things: 

1. Easier access to primary sources (especially images) relating to the textbook chapters. We responded by creating Annotated Resource Sets. What's an Annotated Resource Set? It's just an easy way to organize links to images, videos, maps, documents, and other resources. For each resource we include a title and/or brief description, where the resource is from (collection information) the file format (jpg, pdf, etc.), the URL at which you can download the resource, and a thumbnail image of the resource.

We've created  Annotated Resource Sets for Montana: Stories of the Land chapters 6-13 and 15-18: gold rush, treaty period/Indian wars, cattle frontier, railroads, War of the Copper Kings/statehood, reservation period, timber, homesteading, Progressive Era, WWI, Great Depression. But, obviously, you can use the primary sources in the resource sets without using the textbook.

2. Primary sources read aloud, accompanied by relevant images. The teachers liked and assigned our Learning from Historical Document Units, which feature excerpts from letters, diaries and other primary sources relating to the Montana: Stories of the Land chapter theme. But they said that some students struggled to read them and lobbied for narrated PowerPoints/video clips in which the documents were read aloud, accompanied by relevant historic photos. 

In response, we put together six narrated PowerPoints, which are now available as a playlist on our YouTube channel. Included in this playlist are Emily Meredith's letter from Bannack, 1863, Cornelius Hedge's letter from Helena, 1865, Alma Coffin's reminiscence, describing traveling by stage in 1878, Albert Ronne's letter about setting up a ranch in 1892, and two contrasting letters about the IWW timber strike in 1917. For good measure, we recorded two other narrated PowerPoints, both of which focus on WWII objects as primary sources: a comic strip about Marine Private Minnie Spotted Wolf of the Blackfeet Reservation, and the chalk and wood message from the Smith Mine Disaster in Bearcreek.

Let me know if these turn out to be useful and if you want us to make more (either of the Annotated Resource Sets or the narrated PowerPoints)--and if so, for what topics/chapters/documents.  I'm happy to try to fit this in as I have time, if I know the material will actually be used.  

Want to talk more about teaching with primary sources? There's still time to sign up for tomorrow's online October 20, 4:00-5:00 p.m., online professional development, "Primary Sources for Teaching Montana History," where we'll share our best ideas for finding and incorporating primary sources into your Montana history class. 

 

 

Teaching Montana History is written by Martha Kohl, Outreach and Interpretation Historian at the Montana Historical Society.

Inquiry, primary-source based lessons at your fingertips

The Stanford History Education Group creates some of the smartest, best curricular material out there. They have twenty-five new Reading Like a Historian lessons, 24 new History Assessments of Thinking, and twelve newly revamped lessons--all for free (although you do have to register.) Among the available lessons is this one on the Carlyle Indian Industrial School. Like all SHEG lessons, this high school lesson asks students to engage in a historical inquiry by analyzing primary sources from different points of view to answer a guiding question (in this case "what was the purpose of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School.)

If you teach middle or high school, and don't use SHEG's resources, I encourage you to take a moment and browse their site. You'll like what you see.

Historic newspapers are the bomb-diggity!

Longtime readers may be tired of hearing me say this (for example here and here), but there's nothing like reading a historic newspaper to get a glimpse into the past.

Sure newspapers reflect the biases of their times and their editors, who chose what to cover based on what they thought their subscribers (and political bosses) wanted to read. Case in point: When I was researching the book I wrote about weddings, I looked in vain for articles in towns that had huge immigrant communities (Lewistown and Roundup, among others) for articles announcing immigrant weddings (and describing the festivities). I finally figured out that Croatians, Germans, and other non-English speakers didn't subscribe to English language newspapers, so there was no incentive to the editor to cover their events! Finding balanced historical coverage about Montana Indians is also next to impossible. And yet...

Newspapers are great for glimpsing the details of daily life--to discover the available food and technology, learn what people did for fun, explore fashion or types of work, and investigate coverage of local, national, and world events.

All of which to say, hurrah for my colleagues in the Newspaper Digitization Project, who have put over 950,000 pages of newspapers online for you to search and browse on the websites MONTANA NEWSPAPERS and CHRONICLING AMERICA. The newest additions include more issues of the Grass Range Review (now available from 1912-1932 on Montana Newspapers) and  these titles on Chronicling America:

• The Bozeman Courier (1920-1927)
• The Fort Peck Press (1934-1937)
• The Glasgow Courier (1942-1945)
• The Kevin Courier (5/5/1922-8/23/1922)
• The Montana Courier (8/30/1922-9/20/1922)
• The Kevin Review (9/27/1922-12/25/1924)
• Laurel Outlook (1944-1950)
• The Wolf Point Herald (1920-1932)

Happy surfing!


P.S. 950,000 pages seems like a lot, and it is! But there even more newspapers aren't available digitally than are so don't be surprised if you don't find your town or specific dates you are looking for (know too additional papers are available from other sites but that they, unlike Montana Newspapers and Chronicling America, charge a subscription fee.).

P.P.S. Do you use historic newspapers with your students? If so, tell me how!