Donner Springs
Exploring Our School Namesake
Time Frame – 1846
Barbara Laber
Teaching American History Project
Summer Institute 2009
In Search of the West: Communities on the Move
This is a primary activity unit developed for beginning readers. The focus is for students in Kindergarten or the first quarter of first grade. Preferably the unit would be used during the month of October when the Donner Party crossed into Nevada.
Portfolio Cover Sheet
Nevada/Washoe County School District Standards
United States and Nevada History
H1.1.1 Describe local life long ago, including jobs, school, communication, transportation, and recreation.
H.1.1.2 Listen to stories that reflect the beliefs, customs, ceremonies, and traditions of the varied cultures in the neighborhood.
H1.1.3 Listen to histories of important local landmarks that create a sense of community among citizens.
Geography
G5.1.1 Differentiate between and identify water and land on a map and globe and use the terms ocean and continent.
G5.1.2 Describe maps as representations of places.
G7.1.2 Explain that some people live in locations other than where they were born.
Citizenship
C16.1.1 Name their school
Background
This unit of study will explore learning history by helping students make connections with the westward movement by starting with familiar places. In particular we will be exploring the Donner Party and Donner Springs. These places are within the students locale. Our school, Donner Springs Elementary school is purportedly located in an area that the Donner Party passed through on their fateful journey to California. In Frank Mullen’s book, The Donner Party he imparts the following information:
Tamsen Donner, the teacher who planned to start a school in California had her 150-year-old dream come true in Reno with the dedication of Donner Springs Elementary School.
The school is located in Donner Springs in Reno, where the Donner Party may have encamped before going west into the mountains. (Mullen, Frank, The Donner Party Chronicles, p. 181)
The students will learn about westward migration by learning about the journey of the Donner Party. This group of was part of a mass migration to the west, brought on by the manifest destiny touted by the United States government. In May of 1846 the Donner and Reed families left Independence, Missouri to make the journey to California. By October 20, 1846, the Donner Party had made it across the Great Plains, the Continental Divide, the Great Salt Lake, and finally the Forty Mile Desert. The Donner Party arrived in the Truckee Meadows and camped in what is known today as Donner Springs. There is grass and water and they rest. They see snow on the mountains of the Sierra; they know they are late but believe they can still cross because last year Hastings Party crossed just before Christmas. The last 70 miles of their journey become the hardest and most fateful. By October 31, they are trapped at Donner Lake. Of the 87 people trapped in the snow, only 54 survive.
Table of Contents
Activity 1: Primary Source –Donner Party and the Donner Springs, Past and Present Learning Goal: As a whole class students will analyze primary sources related to the Donner Party of the past and pictures of Donner Springs today. Students will sort the primary sources based on past and present. Then they will make guesses how these things might connect together. Every student will participate in creating a brain web using Inspiration software.
Activity 2: Wordle – Home Means Nevada and This Land is Your Land
Learning Goal: Students will learn the Nevada State Song and This Land is Your Land. They will introduced to geographical and land form vocabulary. They will also learn that songs and singing were an important part of life on the emigrant trail.
Activity 3: Literature connection – Patty Reed’s Doll
Learning Goal: Students will listen to selections from Patty Reed’s Doll written by Patty Reed’s Doll. They will create a who, what, where, when foldable. They will write draw and write about a day in their life using another foldable that is broken down into morning, afternoon and night.
Activity 4: Foldable – A Day in the Life of a Donner Springs Student
Learning Goal: The students will create a foldable that contains the journaling of a day in the life of a Donner Springs Elementary School student. It will be broken down into morning, afternoon and evening. The student will provide a picture of an activity they were doing for each time period.
Activity 6: Art Activity- Building and Packing a Covered Wagon
Learning Goal: The students will make a covered wagon and fill it with items the pioneers took on their journey. They will learn vocabulary of the west.
Activity 7: Student Project – Photostory of Donner Springs and the Donner Party
Learning Goal: The students will work together to select pictures and dictate text that will be used to create a class Photostory project illustrating the connections between the Donner Party and Donner Springs. This will be a simpler version of a similar project done by the students Elitha Donner School in California.
#1 Primary Source Activity – Donner Party & Donner Springs
Past and Present
Student Learning Goal:
The students will investigate multiple primary source documents to discover how these documents are connected.
Procedure:
The teacher will hand each student a document. She will ask them if they can describe what they see. Is it familiar, have you seen this before? Is this document part of the present or the past?
Materials: See attached file of Donner Party and Donner Springs photos and documents. Inspiration software. Activboard. Writing paper.
Evaluation:
Students will be evaluated on their involvement in the activity and their cooperativeness in their group during group discussions and webbing activity. Each student will provide one idea to add to the Inspiration brain web prepared by the teacher using Inspiration and an Activboard. After the teacher will explain the pictures and present the connection between the school’s namesake and the Donner Party. To conclude each student will write a sentence to go with their picture. If needed the student may dictate their sentence to the teacher. The sentence and picture will become a class quilt for display. Students will be individually evaluated for the quality of their sentence:
- Does it relate to the picture?
- Does the sentence make sense?
#2 Wordle Activity -
Home Means Nevada
This Land is Your Land
Student Learning Goal: Students will learn the Nevada State Song and This Land is Your Land. They will be introduced to geographical and land form vocabulary. They will also learn that songs and singing were an important part of life on the emigrant trail.
Procedure:
The teacher will present the wordle document containing Bertha Raffeto’s Home Means Nevada and Arlo Gutherie’s This Land Is Your Land. Preferably this will be done on either a Smartboard or Activboard. Students will be asked to find words they know. To come up and point them out and say them. Then they will be asked to guess what the words might mean if they were not all scrambled. What kind of words are they? Person, place, thing, or doing?
Next the students will listen to both songs. Now can they guess what the wordle’s are. The teacher will ask them if they had ever heard these songs before? Then the teacher will explain that when pioneers were on the trail song was an important because it was a form of entertainment. Families met in the evenings after being on the trail to sing and pass the time.
The students will be asked to select a word and illustrate it on a 5”x7” card to create a vocabulary poster.
The students will learn the songs Home Means Nevada and This Land is Your Land. When they are singing and hear their word, they will raise their word/picture card.
Materials: See attached file of wordle documents and song lyrics for Home Means Nevada and This Land is Your Land Activboard. 5”x7” cards, crayons.
Evaluation:
Students will be evaluated on their involvement in the activity and their cooperativeness in their group during group discussions. Each student will create a 5”x7” card containing their chosen word and a picture of the word.
Word card evaluation:
- Is the word selected one of the words from either song?
- Is the word spelled correctly?
- Does the picture match the word?
Activity #3 – Literature Connection
Patty Reed’s Doll by Rachel Laurgaard
Learning Goal: Students will listen to selections from Patty Reed’s Doll written by Patty Reed’s Doll. Students will be able to relate simple facts from the story. They will create a who, what, where, when foldable.
Materials: a copy of the foldable who, why, where, when of Patty’ Reed’s Doll.
Inspiration software
Activboard
Download text to Patty Reed's Doll
Procedure:
Each day, the teacher will read a chapter OR selection from Patty Reed’s Doll. After hearing the selection the teacher will add a fact to a web created in Inspiration for Patty Reed’s Doll. At the conclusion of the story the teacher will review the facts with the students and identify the who, what, where, facts for our foldable. The students will complete the foldable following the teacher’s modeling.
Evaluation:
The students will be evaluated on their foldable. The journal is worth 10 points. The student’s grade is based on the foldable’s completion and effort put into it. The breakdown is as follows:
Cover: 3 points
- Book Title (Patty Reed’s Doll)
- Student Name
- Picture
Who: 2 points Picture of Patty Reed and her name
Where: 2 points name of place Patty travelled during the story, and a picture of the place.
When: 1 point for the year 1846
Why: 2 points – family moving to California with picture of a covered wagon.
Activity #4 – Foldable
Life in the Day of a Donner Springs Student
Learning Goal: The students will create a foldable that contains the journaling of a day in the life of a Donner Springs Elementary School student. It will be broken down into morning, afternoon and evening. The student will provide a picture of an activity they were doing for each time period.
Materials: Foldable book for each student.
Digital camera
4x6 photopaper
Color printer
Activboard
Crayons
Glue
Pencils
Procedure:
Each day, the teacher will read a chapter OR selection from Patty Reed’s Doll. After hearing the selection the teacher will share other books about children of the westward migration (Children of the West, By the Great Horn Spoon, One Blue Bead, and My First Little House.) The children will be asked to discuss differences and similarities between children of the past and children of the present. The students will identify things they do in the morning, at school, afterschool, and in the evening. The teacher will make a list for each of these timeframes on the Activboard. The teacher will take a picture of each student in front of the school for the cover of their Day in the Life Student Journal. Each student will receive their picture and attach it to the cover of their journal. They will complete the cover, and then draw a picture for each time frame of them doing their favorite thing. Then they will assemble the foldable on top of the pictures and cut out the doors. (See example from foldable book.) They will share their journal with another student in the class and explain the pictures. Students will learn about comparing cultures past and present, and different times frames during the day.
Evaluation:
The students will be evaluated on their foldable. The journal is worth 10 points. The student’s grade is based on the foldable’s completion and effort put into it. The breakdown is as follows:
Cover: 2 points Student Name
Picture glued on neatly
Morning: 2 points picture of morning activity
School: 2 points picture of school activity
Afterschool : 2 points picture of afterschool activity
Evening: 2 points picture of evening activity
Extra Credit will be given to students who write about each activity.
Activity #5 – Art Activity
Make and Pack Your Covered Wagon
Learning Goal: The students will make a covered wagon and fill it with items the pioneers took on their journey. They will learn vocabulary of the west.
Materials: The following items are needed for each student.
Shoebox –
1 - Brown construction paper to cover box
1 - White construction paper for canvas roof
2 – copies of wagon wheels on tag board
(4 wheels total)
1 – copy of items to pack in wagon on white paper
For students to cut and color
1 – cloze sheet entitled My Wagon Train Journey
Teacher Materials:
Activboard or overhead
(Collection boxes created on Activboard, overheard, or chart paper with the following headings: method of travelling, time to get there, destination, items taken.)
Procedure:
The teacher will share pictures of covered wagons and read about items carried by the pioneers on their journey west from The Donner Party Chronicles by Frank Mullen, Jr. (see attached pages 40, 41,54,55,56,57). The teacher will have scanned these pages in so students can view them on the Activboard (overhead could be used instead).
The teacher will engage the students in a discussion about trips they have taken. How did they travel? Where did they go? How long did it take to get there? What did they take with them?
The teacher will collect this information in collection boxes organized in the following categories: mode of transportation, destination, travel time and things taken on the journey.
Then the students will be asked to help the teacher create a chart for Patty Reed using the same categories: mode of transportation, destination, travel time and things taken on the journey. The teacher will ask for comments, are there any similarities? What are the differences? Would you like to travel in a wagon going west?
The teacher will hand out the items to be colored and included in their wagon. They will read the names of the items together, then spend time coloring them.
Teacher will model the following and then the will make the wagon. Students will make a wagon using the shoe box, and tag board handouts. The shoebox needs to the covered with brown paper, the wagon wheels cut out and glued to the sides. The white construction paper is glued on each length wise edge of the shoebox creating a balloon effect for the canvas of the wagon.
Students will choral read with the teacher items to be colored and placed in the wagon. Students will cut and color items to be placed in wagon.
Teacher will model completing the Cloze activity with students help. As a concluding activity students will fill the blanks for the cloze activity about going on a wagon train journey to the west, with teacher help.
Evaluation: 1 point for naming a destination
1 point for telling how low it will take
1 point for each item taken on the journey (5 max)
3 points for completing I think my journey will be..
Total 10 points
Extra points given for correct spelling
letter-size, capitalization and neatness.
Activity 7: Student Project
Photo Story of Donner Springs and the Donner Party
*Please note this project was modified for primary students. Each student will be responsible for contributing a piece to ultimately create a class project. This activity could be modified for upper grades by requiring them to complete the activity on their own.
Learning Goal: The students will work together to select pictures and dictate text that will be used to create a class Photo Story project illustrating the connections between the Donner Party and Donner Springs. This will be a simpler version of a similar project done by the students Elitha Donner School in California.
Background: During my research on the Donner Party, I discovered another school was named for a member of the Donner Party. Elitha Donner Elementary School in Elk Grove, California was named for Elitha Donner, daughter of Tamsen Donner. Donner Springs Elementary School was named for Tamsen Donner who did not survive the journey and perished at Donner Lake in the winter of 1846. The students of Elitha Donner Elementary School went on a journey of discovery to learn about their namesake. The culminating activity was a video project relating facts and information about the Donner Party and Elitha Donner.
Procedure: Share with the students the background information on Elitha Donner and the Elitha Donner Elementary School. Watch the video prepared by the students of Elitha Donner Elementary School at the website: http://www.secctv.org/video/?p=405 .
Explain to the students that we are going to make our own video story about the Donner Party and our school namesake Donner Springs. Re-read Frank Mullen’s school dedication information regarding Tamsen Donner and Donner Springs Elementary.
Take the students out and photograph the students as a group standing in front of our school.
Next revisit information and pictures we have collected during our unit of study on the Donner Party. Have students help the teacher make a list of those things we think we should include in our video. Have each student select an item from the list that they would like to search for a picture and write a sentence about to include in the Photo Story video. Utilize picture sentence template to help students with writing portion.
Once every student has submitted a picture with text, work together as a class to organize the order of the pictures. Decide if we need to add additional pictures and information. Once the teacher has input the pictures, the students using a computer microphone will speak the lines they have written to go with the picture.
The culmination will be sharing the Photostory Video during open house night in October and as part of the first grade Nevada Day rotation activities.
Evaluation:
Elements
3pts – Student picked a picture appropriate for the activity.
3pts – Student wrote a complete sentence that has meaning for the picture chosen.
3pts - The sentence demonstrates a knowledge of the elements Donner Party or westward migration.
3pts -The sentence is written neatly, with correct letter size and punctuation.
3pts- The student was able to read the sentence into the microphone with ease and fluency.
Total 15 pts
For each element the student point scale is as follows:
3 points Exceeds
2 points Meets
1 points Needs Improvement
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