Case Study Elementary Example
1. Introduction
The sources for the lesson were photos of facsimiles of Virginia Native American artifacts for Jamestown. The photos included: inside a longhouse, outside a longhouse, a table with tools made out of natural resources, and Powhatan’s cloak. I chose these photos because they brought the Native American Powhatan into the classroom and let the students visualize objects related to Powhatan life. I wanted my students to learn how the shelter, clothing, and tools were used and what they were made of.
I was able to link this lesson with past lessons from previous grades about similarities and differences among Native American people groups and how they lived based on their differing surrounding environments. I was also able to integrate this lesson with a science unit on natural resources.
From what I know, this was the first time the students had worked with primary sources. The students had some background knowledge about differing regions’ Native American people groups froma social studies unit in second grade. During the lesson, I asked questions to lead the students in noticing the different objects in the photos. I also wanted the students to generate their own answers to some of the questions they had themselves, and so I involved myself in their discussions to probe for those student-generated answers.
2. Reading the Source
The students began generating an enormous amount of questions such as: Why is one of the tools a deer hoof? How did they stay warm during the winter? What did they close their door with? How did they light a fire but not burn down their longhouse? The students observed that there were rocks in the middle of the longhouse. They noticed that the deer’s hoof was very sharp like a knife. They noticed that there were many deerskins hanging on the inside walls of the longhouse. The students also noticed there were baskets on the shelves within the longhouse. They noticed that a tree stump was a table. Not only that, but the students noticed that all of the tools were not made of metal but were made of bone or stone.
The students applied close reading by noticing details about what was inside the longhouse and specifics about the tools. In regards to sourcing, the students were thinking about what type of people would use this kind of building and how the people adapted to their surroundings. The students contextualized by recognizingthat the native peoples whose objects we were observing lived in the forest. The students were aware from a timeline that the Powhatan objects we analyzed were used before and during the establishment of the Jamestown settlement in that region. One of the students came up with the idea that native peoples began using steel and metal knives after contact with Europeans. Because I showed the students a photo of the inside of a Powhatan dwelling, the students then used their first observations and applied these to the other photos I showed them after including the tools and clothing. The students corroborated by comparing and contrasting the photos of the same Native American tribe and time period. The students placed the source in historical context through discussion and by concluding that people from the area no longer utilize their natural resources in the same way.
3. Interdisciplinary Connections (add the specific content standard as well)
The interdisciplinary connection I chose to include in my lesson was the science unit on the study of natural resources used bynative peoples within their respective environments. The students discussed that deer were a prevalent resource on Powhatan land. The students connected this knowledge of natural resource wildlife with the tools and clothing made from the deer once it was hunted. The students also recounted that the areas surrounding Powhatan villages were heavily populated with trees. Hence, the students linked this background knowledge with the natural resource the native peoples used to build their longhouses with. Furthermore, the students noticed that the water resources from the rivers and creeks could have been used as a source of food from fishing and for transportation. I chose this subject to concentrate on because the native peoples depended heavily on their natural resources for survival. The students responded well by meshing their understanding of natural resources with the native peoples’ way of life in regards to their shelter, clothing, and tools. Including the interdisciplinary connection came naturally to me, because of my passion for science.
4. Analyzing student work
The written assignment was for the student to record his or her observations of what he or she noticed, knew, and wanted to know about each photo shown. The students worked in pairs and were given a graphic organizer to record their findings. The objective was for the students to jot down at least three things they observed, three things they knew, and three questions they had about what was shown. The student pairs were each given a color photo on 8 ½ by 11” paper; the same photo was shown on the Promethean board as well.
The students learned that the native peoples were living very differently from Europeans at the time. The students also learned that the native peoples really utilized everything around them. The students learned that the Native Americans’ vastly different way of life may have shocked the Europeans who arrived. The students learned that many objects we use today and many objects that were used by Europeans back then were also used by Native Americans. The major difference was that Native Americans made their objects from natural resources whereas modern societies and 17th-century Europeans made many of the same types of objects from refined metal and other manufactured resources. The students provided evidence for historical thinking by thinking like archaeologists and historians through the questions they generated and the observations they made, as well as the connections between what they had previously learned and the new information they were absorbing from the images. The students did well with questioning and analyzing each photo. As this was the first time the students had worked with primary sources and organized their thoughts into the categories of “notice,”“know” and “questions,” the students needed modeling before completing the assignment independently. I think that with practice and similar assignments, the students will gain experience and strength in thinking and recording their observations like a historian.
5. Reflecting on the lesson
I learned from this experience that you can only do so much with a book and that the children need those visuals when talking about history. Three pictures could easily lead into an hour-long discussion with many, many questions and many, many student-generated conclusions. The students were analyzing and were given the ability to think critically about this time period from a more real-life perspective. The students were connecting what they previously knew with what they were currently observing. The students were producing answers to their own questions based on their observations of details and discussion with their partners. There were some problems in the beginning withdifferentiating between what the students should record in the “notice” section and the “know” section. After modeling, the students got the hang of it, and this no longer posed a problem. Having the graphic organizers prepared ahead of time for the students to use helped them get started more quickly than if they had to draw the organizers on their own. Modeling how to record what we noticed, what we knew, and questions we had also enabled the students to know the expectations of the assignment. I think a way to have added to this lesson would have been to piggyback it onto a writing assignment where the students would use the objects we analyzed from the photos and incorporate these objects into a story or journal entry from the perspective of a Native American living at that time.