Transcript for Kids in School (1862-1973)

Hello, teachers. I'm Jessica Ellison from Teacher Education at the Minnesota Historical Society. And I'm here to share some great resources with you that we have on our website. This one in particular is for our elementary teachers. Now we have the kids in school lesson. That's a shorter version. If you don't have that much time, want to just get your kids thinking about the past.

But then we also have created a longer version of kids in school. So you can start with the primary source set that's on our website and the point of this lesson is to get kids really thinking deeply about what school is like for them and then make connections to what school was like in the past and find similarities and differences.

So with this lesson, it's really best to print out the pictures from the primary source set if you can. Have students talk about what school is like for them and begin to think about them in terms of different categories such as friends, teachers, play and learn. After you post the categories up around the room and give students an opportunity to look at all of these primary sources.

You can have them either individually or in groups, post the pictures where they think it makes the most sense. And what's really fun about this is that no two kids are going to put pictures in the same place. So if you have one group of kids post the pictures, they might put them in totally different categories because every student's experience is different.

But then the next step of this lesson is that you want to have students take a really good look at the images and using either a pen or a Post-it note, post on the pictures what they think is different about these images from their experience in school today. So things like students might play basketball still, but they don't play in dresses, or, we do science, but we have to wear safety goggles.

So this is a really great activity that gets kids up and moving, thinking about themselves, thinking about the past, and you can modify it in a lot of different ways for your learners. Be sure to check out the primary source set on our website as well as the accompanying lesson and all of our other great resources.