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Rachelle
Francis
4th and 5th Grade
History Club
Orchard Park Central School
Erie Canal Project
Rachelle Francis
Eggert Elementary, Orchard Park
4th & 5th grade History Club
This has been a very rewarding project this year!
The first thing we did was to read books and articles about the Erie
Canal, focusing exclusively on the western terminus from Tonawanda
to
Buffalo.
We watched a movie about Erie Canal and did Internet research for
maps
and pictures. The “mother lode” was the Library of Congress site
with
detailed maps of Buffalo’s harbor in several different years.
Our first field trip was along the old route, finding geocaches
hidden
along the way and planting a few geocaches to bring people to see
the
“Vestiges of the Erie Canal.”
We created a 30-foot timeline, using Timeliner, to show the school
the
evolution of the Erie Canal in Buffalo.
Everybody worked on pages for the PowerPoint, working in pairs and
then
combining it with a uniform look. Unfortunately, the new form of
PowerPoint does NOT interpret into a movie format like the old
PowerPoint did.
We were delighted that the Williamsburg website provided us with a
new
activity to try with cards about the Erie Canal.
Our second field trip was to the Lower Lakes Marine Historical
Society,
where we studied photos of the old canal, saw videos of the giant
scoops of the old grain elevators and learned a lot of background
information.
We then returned to write pieces for our upcoming book, Drowning in
the
Erie Canal (cover enclosed). It is now being finished up with
desktop
publishing. We have had some interest in having it formally
published!
With all the excitement that our history club was generating about
the
Erie Canal, the fifth graders decided to write their annual musical
about the Erie Canal (script enclosed). It contained lots of true
historic details that would never have come forward without our
research. We received some nice press about this play, which
triggered
an invitation from the Erie Canal Harbor Redevelopment project,
offering a personal tour of the new construction!
Last weekend we took our final field trip to tour the new and
impressive Erie Canal redevelopment. We also crossed the Skyway to
Times Beach on the other side of the Buffalo River. There we
geocached
again and helped to clean up the greatly neglected Times Beach.
Thanks so much for your incentive to do exciting things!
Rachelle Francis
Drowning in
the Erie Canal.pdf
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