Standards Met:
VA4MC.1 The student engages in the creative process to generate and visualize ideas.
VA4MC.2 The student formulates personal responses to visual imagery.
VA4PR.1 The student creates artworks based on personal experience and selected themes.
VA4C.1 The student applies information from other disciplines to enhance the understanding and production of artworks.
EAL4W1 The student produces writing that establishes an appropriate organizational structure, sets a context and engages the reader, maintains a coherent focus throughout, and signals a satisfying closure.
ELA4W2 The student demonstrates competence in a variety of genres.
EAL4LSV1 The student participates in student-to-teacher, student-to-student, and group verbal interactions.
ELA4LSV2 The student listens to and view various forms of text and media in order to gather and share information, persuade others, and express and understand ideas.
SS4CG5 The student will name positive character traits of key historical figures and government leaders.
SS4E1 The student will use the basic economic concepts of trade, opportunity cost, specialization, voluntary exchange, productivity, and price incentives to illustrate historical events.
Lesson Plan:
Students and teacher(s) will discuss each of the artifacts. Discussion topics can include the item’s purpose at the time of manufacture, how a typical household would use it, how and where it was made (perhaps in contrast to how and where a comparable item is made today), items cost, and why a household needed it. Students should be allowed to hypothesize on each artifact’s details before given the facts of it. Teacher(s) then illuminate(s) how and why the items are important, and then, again, asks questions as to how the students or their families might have used the artifacts, or if their families would have had them at all, based on occupation or geography, &c.
After the discussion, students will draw and write their own “scrapbook” or collage of the artifacts—and stories behind them—that impacted them most. The “scrapbook” should include one drawn picture of themselves as they picture their life would be (at any age) during the late Victorian era. At least one item from the trunk should be pictured in the drawing. To the side of the picture, or on the opposing page, they should write what they feel like could be a typical morning or day that would take place for them during said period, or why they chose to include that particular portrait in their scrapbook. (Individual class’ language arts assignments may be incorporated here.) Each of the two responses should have at least one artifact pictured/mentioned in it.
When finished with their scrapbook construction, the students should be able to present their work in front of a group or in front of their class in a “show and tell” format.
