Re: Adding Greatlakes Maritime History to Greatlakes Area Schools Curriculum.

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: : In visiting W. Michigan area schools I've noticed a total lack of knowledge and a great deal of interrest by the students on this topic it's our heritage, its to bad we can't get units on it, added to our states social studies objectives . : : what do you think? : : Dave : I used to do a unit with my third and fourth grade students on Great Lakes shipwrecks. I would bring in photocopies of the Milwaukee Journal from when the Lady Elgin sunk. They got to try and piece together everything in small groups and discovered that not all of the books and newspaper accounts agreed with each other. They would differ on things like the exact number of people who died. : The Lady Elgin was a great one to start with, when teaching in Milwaukee, because it had such a great effect on the city as a whole. : I then had packets of info on some various local wrecks that each group would use to put togther a presentation for the class. I put these together from the Runge collection at the Milwaukee Library. By the end of the unit the kids wanted to know who this John Steel and Kent Bellrichard guys were. :) : I backed the packets up with photos that I had taken of the wrecks, and even some artifacts that they could hold on to and figure out what they were for. They really seemed to get a lot out of this. : The main highlight came at the end of the unit when I would run a discover scuba for all of those that passed the medical waiver. : We added in other things, like GPS and nautical maps. Some of my better students could figure out how to relocate wrecks using a nautical map and the numbers off of my hand-held GPS. I thought that was pretty good for third and fourth graders. : At one school I taught at I even had the music teacher teach them the song "Lost on the Lady Elgin". The idea was to get them to do as many different types of hands-on activities as I could come up with. : I even put the whole thing together for my Master's degree and improved the value of Social Studies classes in my students minds- on average, only 3% of grade school students listed Social Studies as their favorite class, at least that was the number that came up in my research. : Anytime you can do something "hands-on" students will be interested in it. : Jon Zeaman

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