What is the past, and why is it important? How do we learn about events in the past? How are historical accounts influenced by the biases of eyewitnesses?

• understand that their lifetime represents a small piece of history
• make connections between important events in the histories of their families and larger historical events
• take an oral history
• compare and contrast two or more accounts of the same event
• write an account of an event which synthesizes eyewitness testimony from two or more sources

Review the suggested activities, then download and duplicate any online materials you will need. If desired, you can bookmark specific web pages so that students can access relevant online materials directly; print out required pages and duplicate copies as necessary for student viewing.

You might want to review the following EDSITEment-reviewed resources for use in this lesson plan:

• Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory—This site provides several eyewitness accounts of the same event - the great Chicago fire. The three perspectives on the O'Leary legend provide a great opportunity to explore the similarities and differences between two accounts as well as the written report, which became the official historical account.
• Internet Public Library
  • Kidspace
  • This Day in History—This site can be used by students or by the teacher to add events to the class timeline.
• Digital Classroom—This site has a special section for children that includes primary sources and a particularly good timeline, which spans the length of Herbert Hoover's life, but also includes interesting events from the time period.

• Activity 3. Oral Histories
• Activity 4. I'm an Historian

Activity 3. Oral Histories

In this lesson, students will explore how the stories that comprise our history are developed. They will learn about primary documents through interviews of family members about an historical event. To prepare students for taking oral histories, you might want to visit the EDSITEment-reviewed resource Do History, which includes guidelines for taking oral histories.

Students will be asked to interview two family members about the same event. Some examples include:

• Ask two family members who were present about the day you were born or adopted;
• Interview both your father and your grandmother about their memories of your father's bar mitzvah or confirmation;
• Ask your mother and your aunt to describe their first day of school.

Think about the events that students included on their timelines to develop more examples. Keep in mind that events from diverse cultures will help students broaden their understanding of the scope of history. Students may want to tape record their interviews if possible, though distance may require them to conduct such interviews over the phone or email. Students should then fill out the following Versions of History chart, provided in pdf format (younger students may need help writing).

With worksheets in front of them, students will be ready to take part in a class discussion about what they learned. Begin by asking if anyone was surprised by the differences in the two stories that they heard. Why might the stories be different? Some possibilities are that each person remembers different details, or that certain parts of the story were more important to one person than to the other.

Also discuss stories that are very similar. Why aren't there many differences in the two accounts? Perhaps it is a recent event and the two people have not forgotten many details. Perhaps one person's memory is affected by hearing the story from the other person. (For example, if a student were to interview her brother and her mother about her brother's first day of school. Are her brother's memories genuine, or are they formed by hearing the story from her mother?) What does this tell us about history? How do history books get written? The work of an historian is to gather information from many places, including primary sources, and to create an official written account.

Activity 4. I'm an Historian

In the previous lesson, students learned how "official" historical accounts are written. In this lesson, they will write or dictate the official account of the events from their interviews. Students will be required to synthesize information from multiple sources in this lesson. If this is a new skill, it may be necessary to pre-teach it. This can be done as a class by comparing two different versions of a familiar story such as "Little Red Riding Hood" and completing a Venn diagram (you can use the downloadable Venn diagram provided in pdf format) to find the overlapping and disparate elements of the two accounts. Finally, as a class you can write an "official" account using elements from the two versions.

Use the EDSITEment-reviewed resource The Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory to explore first-hand accounts and official written history. Under "Web of Memory" and "O'Leary Legend," you will find three documents: a transcript from the inquiry into the fire, the official report on the fire, and a poem written about the fire. Read the transcript to the students first. Then read the official account.

Discuss details in the official account that did not appear in the transcript. Have students complete the Transcript and Report Venn diagram, as a class or in small groups. Help the children to understand that many people were interviewed about the incident, and that the information from all of these accounts was written into an official report. Using this as an example, students should synthesize the two accounts they have of their historical events to dictate or write the "official" account. You may also want to read stories of America's children from America's beginnings to 1860, and after 1860, available through the EDSITEment-reviewed resource Digital History, or "Eyewitness—History through the eyes of those who lived it," available through the EDSITEment-reviewed resource Internet Public Library in the Kidspace section.

Selected EDSITEment Websites

• Digital Classroom
• Digital History
• Great Chicago Fire and the Web of Memory
• Internet Public Library
  • Kidspace
  • Eye-Witness -- History through the eyes of those who lived it
  • This Day in History
• Do History