Building literacy across the curriculum: forging connections with the past through artifacts

HISTORY

What does it mean to be a historian? what do historians do?
- Analyze the past
- Interpret the evidence
- Examine written records to understand the past.

Students should be able to:
- Think chronologically
- Understand historical documents

Artifacts activity:
Based off the artifacts that were given, the students will be able to find out who the person is/ what topic is. 
- It requires chronological thinking and predictions.

Artifacts are pieces of history (pictures, documents, graph, photographs, and etc.)

Questions:

• What do you notice first?
• find something small but interesting
• what do you notice that you didn't expect?
• what do you notice that you can't explain?
• what do you notice that you didn't know?

1. who/what?
2. when?
3. where?
4. why?
5. how?

Comments on the activity:
The activity I did in class was very interesting. I was given three artifacts: a birch tree portrait, a diploma in different language, and a decorative spoon. These three things are explaining Russia and Dr. Smirnova. It was very interesting activity because I felt like I am a historian. I had to type every single letters in Russian on a website to have the English translation. That's how I found that the diploma was belong to Dr. Smirnova. Also, I have learned that the birch trees are the symbol of Russia. With these founding, our team was able to guess these artifacts are all about Russia and Dr.Smirnova. I thought that it was fun and interesting to learn the topic/person in this way. I was able to actually explore and make a prediction.