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Unit 3:Week 1:Act 1
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A RIVER: How did rivers help the exchange of materials and ideas?
Summary: In this activity students take pieces of local or regional river history, illustrate them, and place them in chronological order. As an extension or as homework they write stories spanning segments of time.
Materials:
Index cards
Ideas for River Time Line
Paper and crayons
Classroom Management: You or your students will need to gather a set of events in the life of the history of your nearest river, and write them on index cards. There should be enough cards for each student in class, or you could make a smaller set and divide students into teams. This card set would be a resource for other classes.
A local historical society, or local librarian could be helpful. You might find that other classes within your school has already gathered information on your waterway and that this would be helpful to you.
Students from other countries could be asked to share information about the rivers they know.
Note: We refer to rivers, but some of you may have a large lake or a long canal as your most significant waterway.
Background:
For at least four or five millennia rivers have been the major transportation routes for trade, information exchange, and exploration. Civilizations first arose by the sides of rivers, buildinftheir first towns on their banks, and controlling passage across in order to defend territories. Bridges built over rivers have been heavily defended, and most cultures have bridge and river stories that are exciting to read. Rivers also serve as water supply for drinking and washing, and as a site of sacred ceremonies. Rivers have also, unfortunately, served as a dump for all kinds of unwanted refuse of those same civilizations.
Rivers differ from one another in nature. Some are regular, predictable, flooding annually, like the Nile, while others flood unpredictably, like the Tigris and Euphrates, and have occasioned well known flood stories. In the last several decades citizens around the world have realized how much their rivers have become polluted; now there are many citizen groups monitoring their rivers. Students can learn a great deal from one another's stories of rivers.
Activity Steps:
1. Warm up: Look at map and source documents featuring your river. How large is your waterway? With whom is your waterway shared? Was it fought over? What was the role of this waterway in the history of your neighborhood? What materials traveled up and down? What ideas? By what means did they travel?
2. Illustrate: Focusing on river history, especially transportation of materials and ideas, illustrate important moments as described in the index cards.
3. Place in chronological order. Place the illustrations in chronological order.
Extensions: Write
a autobiography of your river.
Each student could write their own whole autobiography, or a
class "scribe" could assemble the pieces as they are
read and shown out loud.
Act out key times in the history of the
river. Possible roles:
Someone with something to sell, villagers who want the materials,
boat builders, waterway regulator, negotiator to deal with people
on other side of river; military man who needs a fort.
Present
your waterways work to the larger community next.
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