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Katie Clouse
08 09
Project
Summary
West Valley Central School
1. General
Overview of the Proposed Project:
Students will discover how their town of West Valley has changed
over time.
2. Clear Purpose
and Objective
Through
the use of a variety of maps, other primary source documents and
internet sites, students will research the changes that have
occurred in their town throughout history and use the information to
create maps of the town from various time periods and a small scale
model of the town from a specific time period.
3. Stakeholders:
grade level, who will benefit, who will participate in this project.
This
project will benefit and involve fourth grade regular education and
special education students.
4. U.S. History
Content Area
U.S. History content includes: Geography, Economics, and
Communities
5. Outline
Describing Content
West
Valley’s businesses, past and present, will be investigated and then
compared to identify the changes and growth in the town throughout
the years. This information will then be used to create maps of
various time periods and a small scale model of the town from a
specific time period to be displayed during Open House.
6. Software to be
used, internet materials, contacts, etc.
Primary Source
documents and maps will be obtained from the Historical Building and
the county Historian. A variety of websites will be utilized to aid
in the research and understanding of the information found.
7. Level of
Student Involvement
Students will work
independently and in small groups to gather information. Then they
will work together as a class to produce the maps. Students and
Parent Volunteers will work together to build the scale model of the
town.
8. Evaluation
process (include students when possible
Successful completion
of this project will be achieved when the maps are completed and the
scale model is built.
9. Timeline: how
you envision the project being carried out between start up and
conclusion
The
project will be introduced in September, materials/information will
be gathered throughout the first weeks of school, and the scale
model will be built during the third week of September.
10. Comments or
Questions:
After
completing this project, what is next? Do we want to look at
families living in West Valley over the years? Do we go to the
cemetery and document lives/deaths and then correlate it to the
businesses at the time?
West Valley, Then and Now
Project Journal
Name: Katie Clouse
Grade: 4th Grade
Number of Students: 23 Regular Education and
1 Special Education Inclusion
Number of Minutes Per Day Devoted to the
Project: 40 minutes
8/19/08 – Begin preparations for the project.
I met with the woman in charge of the Historical Society. She will
get out appropriate pictures, etc. and we can come to view them
during the first two weeks of school.
8/21/08 – Met with our Mentoring/Learn & Serve
person and she gave me TONS of information. She has also offered
her Americorps person to help us with this project. She strongly
recommended we meet with Mr. Bill King (our previous town
supervisor). She said that he has many maps that would be of use to
us.
8/23/08 – After researching through the
information I currently have on our town’s history, I have decided
to limit our project to the businesses in close proximity to the
school (approximately a two/three-mile radius of school). Our
construction will be limited to businesses in that area and not
residences (unless they contain a business). I have also decided to
use the years 1900 and 2008 as our ‘target’ years to represent.
8/27/08 – I have compiled a list of businesses
that I believe were in existence during 1900. I will work to find
the exact names of the businesses and the location of each of them.
I am also currently working on listing the present-day businesses.
9/3/08 – I met with Rebecca (the Americorps
person who will be helping with the project) to discuss my visions
for this project. During the meeting, I explained that I am
planning to teach the history of West Valley to my fourth graders.
In years past, my students have had a difficult time visualizing the
differences between West Valley in the past and West Valley in the
present. As a result, I would like for my students build a
3-dimensional map showing each of these time periods to re-enforce
the differences between the two. We will talk about why there were
so many businesses in West Valley in 1900, but there are very few in
2008. Some of the things we will discuss include the impact of the
railroad on West Valley during 1900 (business came because of it)
and the impact of Walmart in Springville on the lack of businesses
in 2008 (businesses closed because of it). During this conversation
Rebecca had many ideas to improve and expand upon my project, some
of which we used, some we did not. She suggested researching and
displaying some of the clothing worn during each of the time
periods. I explained that I didn’t want to allow the project to
become too diverse because I did not want to take away from my main
focus. I felt that if we added too much, it would become too
distracting for my 4th graders. We agreed that she would
work on creating a sketch of the maps that we would use and I would
work on presenting the instruction to the students.
9/3/08 – I met with Mr. King today and gave
him a list of the businesses that we are trying to find locations
for from 1900. He is going to do some research and discuss it with
some of his contacts/resource people and will get back to me with
the information.
9/4/08 – I was stunned to hear that Mr. King
has not only found the locations for all 19 of the businesses that
we had on our list, but he has also discovered the names and
locations of some other businesses that were in existence during
that time and he has a list of present-day businesses in the town of
Ashford. We will just need to narrow it down to West Valley and
then find the actual locations of them. What a HUGE help!! Rebecca
and I met with him and finalized the maps we will use to create the
project.
9/9/08 – We decided that we would build the
maps on a 8’x4’ piece of plywood with a boarder and a divider in the
middle of it. One of our parents made and donated it for us. In
preparation for building, we are reviewing the history of West
Valley in social studies today with a focus on the businesses during
both time periods and why they were (and are) there.
9/15/08 - Construction begins! I had a parent
come in and help with the project. We decided that the project was
not big enough for 24 students to all work on it at one time. So,
in addition to painting the project board, we had some students
working on creating the buildings they would make for the project on
the computer, and others working on matting pictures and writing one
fact about something they learned about West Valley on index cards.
The pictures and fact cards would be being used to create a poster
to be used to display above the project during Open House. This
worked pretty well. We divided the class up and then rotated people
as needed. It was a VERY productive session.
9/16/08 – Finished painting the project board
today and worked on printing our buildings on cardstock, coloring
them, and building them. It is taking a long time to get students
through the computer program for them to design their building.
There are a total of 48 buildings we need – two from each students.
I have decided to design and print half of the buildings and pass
them out for students to start coloring and cutting that one while
they wait for their turn to design their other building. This will
give them something to do while they wait.
9/17/08 – We continued to work on making our
buildings. We have discussed what colors they should be coloring
them. During 1900 they would have been limited as to what colors
buildings would be, while in 2008 they have much more colorful
buildings. We want our model to represent this. Printing out half
of the buildings was a good idea. It made for a much more
organized, calm work session.
9/19/08 – We have told students that ALL
buildings must be finished by today. HOWEVER, we have found that
there are too many buildings on the 1900 map for them to all fit!!
We will need to take the buildings apart and ‘shave’ them down to
fit better on the map without compromising the student’s decoration
of the structure…not a simple task! We started this today, but have
found it to be a slow, tedious process.
9/22/08 – We continue to shave down the
buildings and cannot glue them down until we know all will fit. As
a result, we cannot have students working on the board today. So we
are going to focus our efforts on the poster today. Students are
finishing writing their fact card and mounting it on colored paper
and then attaching it to the poster. We have cut out title letters
and are attaching them to the top of the poster. One of our
teachers wrote a poem years back about the changes in our town
(specifically all the businesses leaving town) and has given us
permission to use it in our project. So that was printed, matted,
and attached under the title on the poster. Students are also
working on cutting out the pictures we have taken and printed
throughout the project and are matting them on black construction
paper and attaching them to the poster. After our work session
today, the poster will be complete.
9/23/08 – We need to attach everything to the
map and put the finishing touches on it. First we (the teachers)
hot glued the houses down. Then we had students use a paint brush
to spread Elmer’s glue on the green parts of the board and attach
grass to it. I bought small cars, horses, trees, and telephone
poles for decorations and they were also glued down. Students glued
toothpicks across the railroad tracks for decoration. We also went
outside and got some small pine tree branches (about 4”-5”) and hot
glued them down.
9/23/08 – We finished gluing the grass and
other decorations down. Then made and attached signs for each map
identifying the year of the map and we created a sign asking people
to not touch our project. At the end of the day the project was
lifted (sideways) out the door to be displayed in the hall for Open
House. It was a HUGE success! Many community members were already
aware of the project and came specifically to see it. Many of our
school board members also came specifically to see it. Everyone was
very impressed…especially when told that our project represented
truly about 85%-90% student work! They made it all! After Open
House the project was transported to our historical building to be
stored. We have been asked to make a presentation to the school
board about our project and to present our project at the annual
Spaghetti Dinner that the Historical Society has in April. We will
have a group of students present for each of them. Students enjoyed
doing this project and learned a LOT while doing it! I would
definitely do it again.
West Valley,
Then and Now 
West Valley, Then and Now
Reflection/Evaluation
Name: Katie Clouse
Grade: 4th Grade
Number of Students: 23 Regular Education and
1 Special Education Inclusion
Number of Minutes Per Day Devoted to the
Project: 40 minutes
The original purpose for doing
this project was to show visually the differences between West
Valley in 1900 and West Valley in 2008. In the past, we have
discussed those differences during our unit on the history of West
Valley, but it has always been a difficult concept for 4th
graders to understand. This year we still taught it during our
unit, but we also built the project as our culminating project as a
visual for students. During the project I often heard students
commenting on how many buildings there were in 1900. During our
research for the project we discovered many of our students’
families have a deep history in our town. We saw old pictures of
some of their relatives hanging in the Community Center. This
pleases them tremendously. They were unaware of the pictures and
were quite interested to see them. We also talked about the
different types of businesses and what they did and then looked at
tools and equipment used in the various businesses when we went to
the Historical Building. I feel the students learned and gained a
LOT from this project. Some of them were simply given the
opportunity to actually see the differences between the two time
periods, while others saw that and also learned a valuable part of
their family history! The kids LOVED it!! They were excited to
work on it and went home and relayed this excitement to parents. I
heard from many parents at Open House how much they loved the
project. If I did the project again, I would definitely use a
bigger board to build it on…possibly two 8’x4’ boards, one for each
map. By doing that, we would not have to shave down the buildings.
All in all, it was a GREAT project and I feel the students gained a
tremendous insight into the town they live in and how their town
originated.
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