Lesson Plans created for The NEH Workshop:
The Most Southern Place on Earth, The Mississippi Delta
Debbie Kaufmann
July 19, 2014
Facing the Future, Forcing our Fate: Grades 4-6
A series of lessons derived from historical events of the Mississippi Delta with the use of
primary sources that introduces intermediate students to the inhumanities opposed upon
African American citizens through Jim Crow Laws and how these laws forced African
American citizens into a world of illiteracy and poverty; thus, shaping their future.
Objectives:
 The learner will outline, trace and label the Delta and significate places of the Delta
on a map of the USA.
 The learner will use a variety of primary sources to analyze events of the Mississippi
Flood of 1927.
 The learner will utilize digital resources.
 The learner will identify reasons for not evacuating the African Americans from
the levee.
 The learner will define segregation, levee, crevasse, plantation, share cropper,
overseer, and commissary.
 The learner will write a narrative through journaling.

NOTE: The objectives listed above are for all of the lessons.
Alabama Course of Study:
12.) Summarize successes and failures of the Reconstruction Era.
• Evaluating the extension of citizenship rights to African Americans included in the
Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution of the
United States
• Analyzing the impact of Reconstruction for its effect on education and social institutions
in the United States
Examples: Horace Mann and education reform, Freedmen's Bureau, establishment of
segregated schools, African-American churches
• Explaining the black codes and the Jim Crow laws
• Describing post-Civil War land distribution, including tenant farming and sharecropping
Lesson One:
1. Introduction: Pass around cotton bolls, allow the students to pull apart and feel
the seeds and thorns.
Introduce students to the Mississippi Delta by showing a clip of the Mississippi Delta:
www.cr.nps.gov/delta/volume2/history.
.
2. Activity: Utilizing the digital interactive tool, Padlet, create a wall, posing the question:
What sacrifices should be used in order to protect and ensure the protection of the
cotton plantations of the Mississippi Delta? Wrap it up with a oral discussion of the
variety of answers, probing the students for in-depth reasoning.
3. Activity: Using computers, visit the website: http://cstpdx.com/show/great-flood
Call on a student to read the excerpt about the Flood of 1927.
4. Activity: (Team building) Pair students to complete a T-Chart graphic organizer,
with the column headings and question: Owners and Workers, list the duties of each
group after the levee broke.
Lesson One, continued5. Wrap Up: Display the following picture on an overhead projectorUsing journals, write a narrative of the young man and his fate. The following
prompt can be used to help motivate reluctant writers:
Where do I go? What do I do? My life after the flood…
http://cstpdx.com/show/great-flood
Special Notes:
To continue this unit the following activities will be utilized in lessons two and three
The photo essay and video clips from: http://cstpdx.com/show/great-flood, Bill Morrison

The New York Times book review of RISING TIDE: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927
and How It Changed America.; By John M. Barry.

http://usslave.blogspot.com/2013/09/rising-tide-great-mississippi-flood-of.html