Great Collection of Lesson Plans

A quick post today just to share a resource that I found. I was doing some research for another blog post and came across this great collection of lesson plans related to the Civil War.

The collection is from Fitchburg State College and is called Teaching American History Program : Lesson Plans and Teaching Ideas for Sectionalism, Civil War and Reconstruction

Enjoy!

Lincoln Loved Learning

Here is another cool use of VoiceThread for your classroom. Melanie Lewis is an Instructional Technology Resource Teacher in Virgina and has created a webpage called Lincoln Loved Learning.

Mrs. Lewis has taken several images from the life of Abraham Lincoln and combined them together with a narrative text using VoiceThread. These photographs depict various parts of Lincoln's life growing up including his family and how he loved to read. What is especially interesting about this project is that throughout the slideshow, several students provide additional insights and comments about the life of our 16th President. Finally, Mrs. Lewis has listed several additional resources for you to explore about the President.

I have discussed the use of this type of technology before, so here is just another example of how you and your students can create and share information. These types of activities are cross-curricular and promote student engagement and creativity.

Here are some ideas for other VoiceThread projects:

• Research a Battle and discussion the important facts
• Research a particular unit and show photos and provide information
• Research a specific figure from the Civil War (lots of possibilities here)
• Research a particular aspect such as medicine and show photos of wounded soldiers

So many possibilities...Let me know what you think and if you create any in your classrooms.

Free Resources Until April 30th!

The Alexander Street Press is providing FREE access to their online Civil War Collections until April 30th.

You can access the following Collections:

• The American Civil War: Letters and Diaries
• The American Civil War Research Database
• Illustrated Civil War Newspapers and Magazines
• American Song

Try this, click The American Civil War Research Database then Click on: Analysis at the top of the page then click on Confederate and Union Losses Chart. You can view graphs of various statistics related to the Civil War, research specific regiments and get statistics (oh my) on soldiers.

For example, the following graph shows a comparison of Union and Confederate Losses of those who died or were killed in battle.


Why do you think there was a large increase in the number of Union soldiers killed in the early months of 1864?