Resiliency Inquiry Activity 1 Life on the Frontier

Task Card Life on the Frontier

In The Sod-House Frontier, Everett Dick provided the details of how one builds his home where there are neither trees for timber nor knowledge of how to make adobe bricks. It's estimated that, on the western prairie, as many as 90 percent of the settlers built with sod.

The excerpt from Mountains and Molehills is a story about a fire in a small town and how the town gets rebuilt. Your task to is to find evidence of resilience among the people who lived on the frontier from these stories and photographs.

Resilience All human beings have the inborn ability to bounce back successfully in spite of life's obstacles.

Directions:

As a team:

1. Read Resource Card A, A Rather Pretentious Sod House, and Resource Card B, Mountains and Molehills.
2. Complete an analysis of photos of sod houses (Resource Card C and Resource Card D) using the Document Analysis Worksheet.

Discuss the following questions with your group:

1. What do you suppose it felt like to live in a sod house?

2. How did town look and sound like after the fire described in Mountains and Molehills?

3. What additional clues do the photographs offer you about living in on the frontier?

4. How did people survive and thrive?

5. Discuss how you think living in this sort of situation shows the resilience of people who settled the American West? How did they create a network of people in their family, friends, and community to survive and thrive?

Group Task

Create a Tableau Create and interpret an event through the use of a tableau. As a group, plan a frozen scene to create and perform that shows resilience. Develop a list of the various people in the scene and brainstorm the possible thoughts and dialogue for each person. Options to Consider A narrator may be included to read a portion of a text describing the scene. A leader taps a person in the scene who speaks "in character" while the others remain frozen. When tapped again, the character stops speaking. Each person has an opportunity to speak; only one character speaks at a time.