Civil War Unit | Lesson Structure

Bellow are several tools I will utilize to help students understand and demonstrate their knowledge about the Civil War. As mentioned earlier most of these assignments will happen in the classroom with the help of wireless internet and laptops.

Lecture
My goal is to keep my lectures to a minimum and make my role as a facilitator or moderator of learning. Below is the chapter preview lecture I gave to the students when we began the project to introduce them to the content and their contingents.



Fakebook
I ran into this gem awhile back and I think this could be used for other purposes as well outside of history education. Here is one for the Gatsby lovers out there. The beauty of making a Fakebook is that students can demonstrate their knowledge of individuals or events through a medium they are already familar with, social media. Bellow is a mock up I made of the Battle of Fort Sumter and what Facebook conversations would take place as a result. I know it is as historically accurate as The Patriot, but I haven't decided if I want students to err on the side of creative control or literal historical accuracy.


This project may require about 3 days (2 within the class) to complete.  Students could use the "armory" (aka box o' books) for their material or their textbooks.  I am still uncertain about how much freedom I would give them to do online research.

Understanding Online Research

image via | http://thinkingoutloud.gr/

If I do allow my class to use online references, then I will require them to cite their sources. This will also require a brief discussion about why citing sources is important. I would talk with the students about what is a valid and invalid source and have a mock up page for them to critique whether or not a a claim or a source is in fact valid (e.g. the image above). This will help them with their critical thinking and researching skills. I would expect this to take up about 15-20 minutes of class time.

Understanding the Greater Purpose
Why did these young men fight? Why would they risk their lives? For country? money? adventure? This is a question I want my students to ask themselves and seek out through an activity involving Civil War diaries. First, I would show the students this video clip from the movie Gettysburg

 

After the video, I would briefly talk about the idea of war and why people fight in them. I would then direct students to a couple of online databases dedicated to Civil War soldier letters/diaries. Some of them include:

• The Civil War Archive 
• Indiana Magazine of History
• Soldier Studies

Students will then break off into their contingents and spend the class time reading at least three letters from their respective side. As they read, students will create a Google doc and fill out a document created by the teacher that asks the "who, what, where, when, and why" questions. Students will e-mail this to the teacher afterwards.

Each group will present three major reasons why soldiers fought in the war. We will then discuss the differences between Northern and Southern soldier reasons for fighting in the war.

Since this can be a daunting task for many students I may have a list of article links for them to use in order to spend more time engaging with the content and less time searching for it. This assignment will take the entire class day.

Personal Diary Assignment
A follow up assignment for individual students would be to take the knowelge they gained from the diaries/letters and create their own letter home based on their Identity Card given to them at the beginning of the simulation. The letter would need to include these elements within one paragraph:

• Standard date, address, and salutation
• What the soldier is currently doing
• How they feel about the war so far
• Is it any different from what they might have felt at the beginning?
• What do they hope for in the future.
• Closing, name of soldier, location of writing.

Students will have 3 days to complete this at home. It will need to be e-mailed or handed in by the beginning of class.

Next: Assessment of Student Performance