Lesson: biography in a bag
Objective: analyze primary and secondary sources
Materials: students artifacts
Activities:
1. Anticipatory Set:
a. collect brown bags from students. Each bag should have 3 artifacts
b. Hand the bags out randomly to students
2. Instructional input / Guided Practice:
a. Teacher’s artifacts – teacher will produce a box / bag with three artifacts
(It is often fun to use artifacts from another teacher the students know).
Show the artifacts to the class and guide them through an analysis of each
item. Complete an artifact analysis chart on the board as students share
ideas. As students to brainstorm ideas for a narrative they could write
about this person.
b. Now, tell students that they are historians and have found a brown paper
bag with three items in it. All that you know about the person is what is in
this bag. Your are to analyze each artifact / document using artifact
analysis sheets.
c. Write a narrative about this person. What do these artifacts tell you about
this person? Consider not only what the artifact might say about the person
but also what might be going on around him/her, the context.
3. Independent practice
a. Instructions
i. Step 1: complete three different artifact analysis
1. In notebook on three different pages
a. Utilize all the steps
ii. Write a narrative about this person: What do these artifacts tell
you about this person?
1. Make connections between artifacts
2. Utilize all steps in your analysis in your writing.
b. Pick a brown bag out of the box and begin the three analysis
4. Closure:
a. Ask students where they are at and assign homework
b. Homework: complete narrative
i. NEED AN EXAMPLE FOR STUDENTS / RUBRIC
Day II
Objective: Analyze narratives for point of views
Materials: student narratives
1. Anticipatory Set
a. Get artifacts out of box or from the person
b. Ask students if they want to present their narratives to the group
2. Instructional input
a. Exchange narratives with the person you wrote about
b. Fact versus opinion
c. You are to pretend that this narrative was published in a History Magazine
of Philadelphia people. You want to write an article in response to this
historians analysis. How would you respond to this article? What did they
get right? Wrong?
3. Guided instruction
a. Get students in their pairs and let them read each others and discuss
4. Independent practice
a. Read narrative and complete a t-chart
i. Agree/disagree
b. Write a response to this article.
i. What did they get right?
ii. What did they get wrong? Why?
iii. What problems do historians have to confront when writing
history?
5. Closure
a. What problems do historian have to confront when writing history?