Marco Paul's Travels on the Erie Canal
Pre-Reading Activities
Activity One: "Mind
Travel"
Preparation
- Print out several copies of the
Graphic Organizer for "Mind Travel"
for student use.
- Primary source materials for the "Mind Travel" activity are
available on the pages linked below. To obtain larger images suitable for
classroom distribution, click on each of the thumbnails. Print out copies of
the four gallery pages and/or the pages containing the larger images.
Lesson
In the first pre-reading activity, students study primary
source materials to increase their understanding of the time period, the 1840s,
in which the story takes place.
- Divide students into small groups.
- Give each group a packet of primary source
materials containing images from American Memory (Part
One and Part Two) and images from
the New York State Historical Association Library (Part
One and Part Two). Students examine
these primary sources to acquaint themselves with the entertainment,
transportation, daily life, and business/industry of the 1800s.
- Give each group a copy of the Graphic Organizer
for "Mind Travel" for keeping track of their observations about
the images.
- Allow students time to study their sources, using the graphic
organizer to guide them through the process.
- As a class, students discuss what they learned from their sources about
life in the 1800s.
- Supplement the primary source materials with information
that may not have been readily evident in the sources provided.
Activity Two: "Terms of the Time" Word Wall
Preparation
- View an example of a word
wall created by students for their classroom.
Lesson
In the second activity, students become familiar with
a number of vocabulary words in the book that are relevant to canal
transportation and to the time period in which the book was written.
- Before beginning to read the book, have students create a word wall with
the following words from Chapter I and the prefatory material:
- weigh lock
- era
- profile
- merchant
- settee
- carpetbag
- promenade-deck
- terminations
- ascended
- emigrants
- excursion
- aqueduct
- contrivance
- engraving
- berth
- Lead the students in a brainstorming session to generate lists of
possible meanings for the words.
- Keep the lists visible while reading the book so that the class can
discuss each word as it is encountered in context.
- As each word is encountered, students
draw pictures to illustrate the word.
- The class may add other words to the word wall as appropriate.
Overview |
Teacher's Guide
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