Meet the Underground Railroad

Grade level 4^th or 5^th grade

Concepts covered/Objectives for students:

• Students will understand that the Underground Railroad was a network of people who faced danger while working together to free slaves and assist fugitives of slavery during the early American 19^th century.
• Students will be able to place the activities of the Underground Railroad with in a specific timeline.
• Students will compare and contrast the vast differences between daily life in the early 19^th century and today, the early 21^st Century.
• Students will identify several key Underground Railroad participants examining their stories, their geographic location(s) and the time of their lives.
• Students will describe actions taken by people on the Underground Railroad or detail a specific escape story.
• Students will convey to themselves and others that the history of the Underground Railroad is only now becoming known and better understood.

Standards for Ohio:

By 3-5^th grade student will be able to:

• Describe the cultural patterns that are evident in North America today as a result of exploration, colonization and conflict.  Describe the cultural practices and products of various groups who have settled in Ohio over time:  African-Americans.
• Explain the reasons people from various cultural groups came to North America and the consequences of their interactions with each other.  Explain the reasons people came to Ohio including:  Freedom from political and religious oppression.

• Use map elements or coordinates to locate physical and human features of North America.
• Analyze ways that transportation and communication relate to patterns of settlement and economic activity.
• Obtain information from a variety of primary and secondary sources using the component parts of the source.

• Use a variety of sources to organize information and draw inferences.
• Describe the experiences of African-Americans under the institution of slavery.

National standards: 

• Knows the reasons why various groups (e.g., freed African Americans, Mexican and Puerto Rican migrant workers, Dust Bowl farm families) migrated to different parts of the U.S.
• Understands how historians learn about the past if there are no written records
• Understands major historical events and developments in the state or region that involved interaction among various groups
• Knows the chronological order of major historical events that are part of the state’s history, their significance and the impact on people then and now, and their relationship to the history of the nation

Procedures:

Day one:  Students will review, explore and discuss a vocabulary (metaphor, network, resistance, vigilance, covert) and keyword list (found at the Menare Foundation’s North Star Website http://www.menare.org/ ) Go to “Research with Resources”.  Teacher could organize this work in a KWL chart.  Through this discussion a brief review of circumstances at this point in history should emerge.

Day two: Students will visit the computer lab or as a class with a computer, Internet access and a projector visit and explore the web site Tracks to Freedom:  Canada and the Underground Railroad sponsored by the Ottawa –Citizen newspaper

http://www.canada.com/ottawacitizen/features/freedom/index.html

On this day or on their own time, perhaps for homework, students will participate in the Interactive Journey “Can You Escape?” link on the front/home page of Tracks to Freedom.  If possible another day could be taken to participate in the journey.

Day three:  Students will be assigned an individual (other than Harriet Tubman) to get to know. The will begin with the brief biography offered at the Dickinson College page of biographical profiles

http://www.dickinson.edu/departments/hist/NEHworkshops/NEH/resource/profiles2.htm

 and then doing their own research seek longer biographies to answer a set of questions (worksheet at the end) about their person.  Students will also collect a picture of their person and save it on their school network folder or some other media with which they will have future access.

Day four:  As a journaling activity, homework or writing assignment students will use the information they have collected to compose a one-page introduction of their Underground Railroad person.

Day five: Students will be given black outline maps of the United States at the mid part of the 19^th century http://www.eduplace.com/ss/maps/pdf/us1860.pdf.  They will first neatly shade all of the areas on the map that say territory so that the size of the United States at this time is visually evident to them.  Next with a different color they will color all of the slave states, then all of the “free” states and then the Border States.  Finally they will locate the state and approximate city location(s) of their Underground Railroad person and indicate these locations with a dot and naming the city.

Day six:  A large time line of major events happening during the first 60 years of the 19^th Century will be hung in the classroom (time line created with Tom Snyder’s Timeliner®).  Students will be given removable labels or sticky notes and they will neatly write the name and life years of their Underground Railroad person and place this name on the larger time line at the front of the classroom.  Another variation would be to have students put their person’s name repeatedly covering the span of their lifetime and see how many of these folks were contemporaries at any point.  Discuss observations or patterns that may emerge. 

Optional but might be interesting to do also on this day:  Have a large version of the map that was given to the students on the wall in the class room and have students add sticky notes or labels of their person on the map and see if there are any patterns as to where these folks are located.

Day seven:  Students will come in small groups to the computer lab to upload their person’s picture and a scanned image of their completed map to a Windows Movie Maker project.  Students will also create a frame with their person’s name and dates of their life. 

Day eight:  Students will come in very small groups to record the reading of their introduction of a person who participated in the Underground Railroad network.

Day seven and eight could take several days or only one depending on the resources of your school.

This project could take up to 10 days depending on the school resources and interest of the students and the teacher.  Teacher will finalize project by putting all slides together with transitions selected by students and burn the final class project onto DVD’s for each student to enjoy and learn from as they “Meet the Underground Railroad”.  The beauty of using Windows Movie Maker is that any classroom that has the Windows XP operating system has Movie Maker and these projects can be burned onto DVD’s that can be viewed on TVs resulting in even more people (i.e. family and friends) having the opportunity to “Meet the Underground Railroad”.

Additional Activities:

For Ohio students and others living in what were once identified as free states it would be a good idea to discuss with students what it meant to be a free state and help them to also understand that often these states were not free of racism.

For Ohio students, they should be able to tell about several actual places in Ohio where famous Underground Railroad activities took place (i.e. Ripley, Ohio, the Ohio River, Oberlin College and in Columbus, the Kelton House).  They could add these locations to a large classroom map of Ohio. 

As a culminating activity for students in Columbus, Ohio a field trip to the Kelton House for the Underground Railroad program could be taken.

Have students during this time simultaneously read a book about escape from slavery.  Some examples:

• Two Tickets to Freedom:  The True Story of Ellen and William Craft, Fugitive Slaves by Florence B. Freedman
• Wanted Dead or Alive:  The True Story of Harriet Tubman by Ann McGovern
• Barefoot Escape on the Underground Railroad by Pamela Duncan Edwards

Visit the web site of the National Freedom Center to learn about Columbus native Aminah Brenda Lynn Robinson, artist and view some of her work http://www.freedomcenter.org/artists/aminah-robinson.html

Students could then create a written or artistic reaction to their person of the Underground Railroad and add this creation to the class DVD.

Using E-Pals, student online email system, http://www.epals.com/  communicate with students in another state about people who were a part of the Underground Railroad network or reaction to the reading of the above mentioned books.

Student Research Worksheet for

Meet the Underground Railroad

What is the name of your person? 

When were they born?                                             When did they die?

Where were they born?

Where did they live? 

Where did they move?

Did they move again?

Did they have a profession, special job or skill?

Were they a former slave or were they a “free” person by birth?

What were their actions or “adventures” with in the network of the Underground Railroad?

Does this person have any special story about them or a story of their escape from slavery?

Collect and save to your school folder a picture of your person.