I was visiting a 4th grade Social Studies class a few years ago and students were completing a “tour of the southeast”, exploring a half-dozen locations across the south as part of their regional journey through the United States, learning how to think like Social Scientists. A student copying the definition of the word “plantation” caught my eye so I decided to poke around a little and see what I could find out about the “Cotton Plantation in Natchez, Mississippi”.
The seven-minute video below shows how you can start with just a picture in a textbook and end up reading letters written to the owner of that house almost two hundred years ago. I would argue that these searching strategies, as well as the copy, paste and click skills, are foundational knowledge to thinking like an historian today. There’s a potential for exploratory exercises with older students, teachers can energize instruction by letting students leave our documents sets and lesson scripts to find out what they can learn on their own.
Ultimately, the house I researched was the not house pictured in the textbook – but the lesson still works.