Individual Project - Christopher Columbus - Hero or Villain?

For my individual prject, I am creating a series on lesson plans with a culminating project on Christopher Columbus. As known, we all learned about Columbus all though school but most of us probably only learned how great a man he was. I have created a 3 day lesson plan in which students will work as a class to find out who this man was. They will be reading and pulling information from various first hand documents such as Columbus' journals and his Letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Students will also use various other documents that talk about the positive and negative aspects of Columbus. Accompanied with this will be a teacher presentation on various facts about Columbus such as his birthday, when he sailed to the New World etc.

At the end of this 3 day lesson, students will work as a class to create a large display case about Columbus to be shown to parents, teachers and students on Open House night at the school. The audience is therefore students, teacher and parents and anyone who attends this school function. Other classes in the school will be doing the same thing for their own classes so there will be lots of display cases to be looked at that night. Students will have both group expectations as well as individual ones. Students will be divided into 4 groups and each group will complete a panel on a specific topic about Columbus for the display case. There will be specific things to be included listed on an assignment sheet. Students will also be required to complete two things individually which will be used in the display case as well.

Residential Cards Finally Arrived!

Okay so, I have received the copies of the residential cards that David Votta from the Capital Area District Library. I have loaded them onto the OMEKA site for our use in the exhibit plans. When Rachel, Erica and I went down there we were told that there are thousands of these cards, only they are very unorganized and not loaded onto their computers as digital images yet. So therefore I am sure that there are more useful cards there if the MHC wanted to actually use this in the future. The resources ARE THERE!!!! Anyway, you should check out the images.... some are nothing too exciting but others are rather interesting to look at.

YAY FOR MORE USEFUL PICS/DOCS

OKAY!!!!!!! So we encountered new documents at the library downtown this week. Rachel, Erica and I went to the library to talk with David who is one of the people in charge of the local history room. We intended to just go down and get copies of some residential cards similar to the one Dr. K showed us in class. We were able to get a bunch of these right in the 700 block of all the streets in the area that we wanted and David will be scanning these into the computer for us and sending them to me as JPG files to upload on the OMEKA site in the next few days or so. He was very helpful while we were there and was also able to show us a folder full of Lansing State Journal Articles from the period of construction that had a lot of great photos. These I have uploaded onto the Omeka site for anyone to look at. Rachel, Erica and I pretty much copied a whole bunch of possibly useful photos to use to show the construction process from a bunch of different angles. In addition to that we did come across one article that had a photo of a store front on it as well which was really exciting since one of out exhibit ideas was to re-create store fronts. I am personally not familiar with the little mom and pop store that we found but it seems pretty cool. Some of the thing loaded on the OMEKA site are not labeled with a lot of detail due to the timing that I had to put them up. Either I or the other two ladies who I worked with will add more information to this as we need it. Hopefully these items are useful for us and if we want anything else David Votta from the library will be around all this week until early next week to help out.

Library update!

OK so after getting in contact with the David from the downtown library, we have a time to go next Tuesday night the 13th. It was the only time that he was available and not busy. We should bring a tentative area/neighborhood to look at because he said there were zillions of cards to look through but that they are organized. I am not sure of the time yet I am waiting for his response to that. If anyone else is interested in going it would be great. More people the better!!!!