Looking for Lincoln #2

Teachers are always looking for free resources! Celebrate the 200th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s birth this February 2009 with the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Commission’s free classroom poster! The front side, suitable for classroom display, is a portrait of Lincoln, while the reverse contains resources for educators, offering suggestions for incorporating Lincoln’s legacy into the classroom. You can request the poster by calling 202-707-6998 or on their website. Act quickly; supplies are limited.

If you really want to mark the Lincoln bicentennial in a big way, you can sign your school up as a Lincoln Legacy Bicentennial School.

It looks like there is to be a National Teach-In on February 12, 2009. I’ll see what else I can dig up on this.



- Karen

Guest Blog Part 3 by Karen Regina

Once I had categories set, it occurred to me that a jigsaw would be a good way to have students work with the information. But that implied a task for groups to do. I had come across the historical head strategy from a master teacher, James Percoco, whose work I was familiar with. (I attended one of his workshops at a National Council for History Education conference one year and use his books in classes I teach for pre-service social studies teachers at UC). Creating historical heads is a good way for students to analyze and synthesize information about a historical figure. And since all the information students use to do this task come from the Internet, there are elements of WebQuests incorporated also.
So that’s how I developed this lesson. I tend not to begin such projects with a preconceived notion. Rather, I explore what’s out there and let ideas unfold till something I like takes shape. It was an apt time to work on this project, with the 2008 election season at its peak, since Taft was elected 100 years ago. I noticed some changes and parallels between now and then. For example, in Taft’s day, there were no primaries and the candidate did not attend the convention. Rather Taft was notified of his nomination at home by a committee. Today’s electorate worried a bit about McCain’s health, while Taft was elected with several health problems. I’m sure you’ll be able to make more connections between the two elections. I hope you like the using the lesson.

Karen's lesson can be found at www.cetconnect.org/taft
Coming soon: Video on William Howard Taft featuring Ray Henderson, Chief of Interpretation at the William Howard Taft National Historic Site, Judge Mark A. Painter, author of a biography of the president, and Dan Hurley, local historian who curated the exhibits at the Taft National Historical Site.

Guest Blog Part 2 by Karen Regina

More on Writing a Lesson about William Howard Taft

Next I turned to a couple of standard American History textbooks. Taft didn’t get much coverage in them. The texts mostly focused on Taft’s relationship with Teddy Roosevelt and how the two had a falling out, which led to Taft’s failure to be re-elected in 1912. There was a lot about Progressive politics then too. So I decided I would focus on information about Taft in my lesson that the texts didn’t address.

So then I turned to the Internet. Soon I had dozens of sites bookmarked and had learned some fascinating new things. I hadn’t known that Taft’s wife played a major role in getting the now-famous cherry trees first planted in Washington, DC. And that it was she who really wanted Taft to be President, while he himself wasn’t too keen on the idea; his goal was to be Chief Justice. On a medical site, I read about Taft’s health problems, which included sleep apnea, a condition historians and doctors have “diagnosed” in retrospect. It seems Taft was often lethargic in the early part of the day and often needed to nap, evidence now seen that he wasn’t getting restful sleep at night because of apnea.

After hours of scouring the Internet, I had accumulated lots of good stuff. Now I needed to figure out what to do with it, since there were so many disparate topics. How could I make it all fit together? I decided to create categories and see if I could fit most of the information into them. I settled on five categories, based on periods in Taft’s life, and proceeded to lay out the pages on a table. (I had printed key pages from each website because, hey, I’m one of those people who still like to work with hard copy!)

Check by next week for Part 3

Looking for Lincoln

Having recently completed a lesson about William Howard Taft for CET, I’m now working on a lesson about President Abraham Lincoln for the station. This will coincide with a new PBS series called Looking for Lincoln coming in February 2009 to mark the bicentennial of his birth.

So now my antenna is up for anything Lincoln-related. Have you ever noticed that when you begin to show interest in a subject, all of a sudden information about it begins to pop up everywhere on your radar screen? That’s certainly been my experience these last couple weeks in regards to Lincoln information. First, I saw a lot of discussion in the news about President-elect Barack Obama’s choices for Cabinet heads, with many commenting that he seems to be modeling Lincoln’s notion of a “Team of Rivals” to shape his Cabinet. Obama appears to be a big fan of Lincoln, not surprising since both have political roots in Illinois. Soon after, I pull the November 24 issue of Newsweek from my mailbox to see Lincoln and Obama on the cover with the line that Obama is “channeling the 16th President.” Interesting premise, I wonder if I can work any of that into a lesson? Next, my periodic online newsletter from the Gilder Lehrman Institute popped up in my email. Want to guess what the featured document of the month was? The Gettysburg Address. Then I see a flyer about the American Bar Association’s Law Day program for May 1, 2009. No surprise. Its theme is A Legacy of Liberty: Celebrating Lincoln’s Bicentennial.

So it looks like this Lincoln bicentennial is going to be big. The CET staff tells me the PBS series is to be based in large part on a new book, Looking for Lincoln: The Making of an American Icon. So I checked it out of the library. Looks like great stuff in it, in short easy-to-read chunks. I also learned of another pertinent book, Lincoln Legends: Myths, Hoaxes, and Confabulations Associated with Our Greatest President. What a cool title!

I’m on a roll!

- Karen Regina

Guest Blog Part 1 by Karen Regina

Karen Regina has a broad background in social studies education as a classroom teacher at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati, museum educator at the Cincinnati History Museum and the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, and as a current faculty member in the College of Education, Criminal Justice, and Human Services at the University of Cincinnati. She earned a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction at UC and subsequently authored a variety of curriculum materials, including several online WebQuests and an elementary textbook, Cincinnati: An Urban History. She contributed several lessons to CET’s Safe Passage project.




Writing a Lesson about William Howard Taft




When I was invited to write a lesson about William Howard Taft for CET’s website, I wasn’t clear about what kind of lesson to create. To be honest, I didn’t know much about Taft, so I took this as an opportunity to learn more about him. My first step was to review the Ohio Academic Content Standards for Social Studies to see what the state expected students to learn about Taft. I was surprised to find that Taft’s name was nowhere to be found, considering that he was a President from Ohio.

I recalled that years ago, when I was on staff at the Cincinnati Historical Society, I had chosen primary source documents from their collections for inclusion in the publication Cincinnati: An Urban History Sourcebook. So I turned to those pages first. There I found items about Taft’s 1908 campaign and inauguration particularly as they related to his hometown of Cincinnati. Making connections to Cincinnati would be a good idea, I thought.

Karen Regina

Come Back to CET Teach next week to learn about Karen's research process for creating a lesson on William Howard Taft.