While WritingFix focuses on the writing traits and the writing process, HistoryFix's focus will be on meaningful writing across the curriculum assignments that can be brought to history and social studies classrooms.
We will feature lessons and resources here that were created by Northern Nevada teachers. Each year, we will sponsor workshops and inservice classes where our best history teachers can come together to propose new lessons and resources to be featured at this website. The template our teachers will use when submitting their lessons is here.
Between 2001 and 2007, the WritingFix website grew from a dozen ideas for writing classrooms to hundreds of ideas. We are confident that this HistoryFix project will grow tremendously as well.
Please freely enjoy using these first lessons and ideas we offer below, but know that each time you come back to this site, you might very well find something new and exciting to bring to your history curriculum.
Lessons created by Nevada teachers
for
HistoryFix:
Historical lessons & resouces found on our sister site: WritingFix
Lesson objectives: Students will analyze primary source documents, pictures, and artifacts using describe, analyze, and interpret method; students will compare and contrast Tahoe City using a sketch from 1865 and a photograph of Tahoe City Today, and show understanding of cause and effect of the comparisons; students will compare and contrast Lake Tahoe from its past to its present.
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Objectives: Students will study a historical event of interest to them, using classroom text books and library resouces; students will create a fictional character who would have been alive and present during their researched historical event; students will create a diary entry from the voice of their historical character, trying to combine emotions and historical facts.
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Lesson objectives: Civil Rights Warriors is a fun way to incorporate the teaching of research and biographies. Students will research a person connected to the civil rights movement and create a trading card on their researched person. Students will identify through research the qualities of a person from history and their connection to the Civil Rights Movement.
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Lesson objectives: Students will study a historical era of interest to them, and they will plan an original story inspired by Elvira Woodruff's story about the Revolutionary War. Each student will compose a story, complete with beginning, middle, and end, where they travel back in time with a companion, witness historically accurate events, then return to their own time with an artifact from the past.
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Lesson objectives: The students will learn the meaning of the words within the Preamble to the Constitution in order to give them a better understanding of its content and of the constitution. The students will write a Found Poem to represent their personal learning from the Preamble.
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Lesson objectives: Students will research and then plan an organized and creative story where an animal or an object claims credit for something historically credited with someone else. Each story must contain, at least, five historical facts that are sequentially correct. Students will attempt to realistically capture the point-of-view of another entity that has witnessed history.
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Lesson objectives: Students will research an immigrant trail, write down descriptive and interesting concepts, and turn it into a concept poem. This lesson can be extended from a poem into a picture book. Moving West is a fun way to integrate research skills and poetry writing.
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Lesson objectives: Students will choose any president (other than Teddy Roosevelt) by researching famous quotes said by him; students will choose five favorite quotes, and they will research events and facts that might have led their chosen president to speak the words found in the quote dictionary; finally, students will organize a five-part report on their president that exclusively focuses on the historical events that inspired their president to utter those words.
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Lesson objectives: Looking for a way for students to find the passion in the Civil Rights Movement and “I Have a Dream” speech? After listening to the audio of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech,” students will locate words in the speech that connect to the Civil Rights Movement and create a diamond-shaped poem of their own. Through the poem students will express their own thoughts of the meaning of the poem and the movement.
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Lesson overview: Using a famous World War II propaganda song, students will explore alliteration by changing the lyrics to create a new version of the song. After discussing what alliteration is and why this particular song was used and enjoyed by the people at home to promote patriotic spirit, the students will play with the lyrics to create their own alliterative patriotic songs. The students will then perform or present to the class their version of the Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.
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Lesson objectives: Many students have a misconception about the Donner Party. The Donner Party was more than just a group of people that were faced with tragedy, bad luck and death. They changed the future for those traveling the West and disproved the Emigrants Guide to Oregon and California. This lesson will help students experience the entire journey of the Donner Party.
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Lesson objectives: Students will choose any president (other than Teddy Roosevelt) and research this president's boyhood history; using the lesson's mentor text as a model, students will imagine that their researched president kept a boyhood journal too, and they will create a fictional but fact-based 15- or 20-day journal about their president's typical daily boyhood life or an extraordinary event (like a trip to Europe) that they discover happened to their president.
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Lesson objectives: The purpose of this lesson is to help students memorize all fifty states and the capitals through classroom visual representation. The students will make a train car representing an assigned state. The teacher will make a train of states on the class bulletin to help students remember the states and capitals. The train will be used by the students to study the population, mottos, flags, and interesting historical facts about each state including important aspects of each of the fifty states.
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Want to build a R.A.F.T. writing assignment?
Click here for social studies R.A.F.T. ideas.
Don't know what a RAFT is?
Click here to learn about R.A.F.T.s at WritingFix.
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Writing Across the Curriculum: HistoryFix
