HRVH Primary Sources for Educators: Everybody Has Chicken Here

Author: Insperatus

Subject: Social Studies

Grades: 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th

NY State Standards: SST1, SST2, SST3, SST4, SST5

The links here will giv eyou access to the full lesson plan as well as links to assosicated primary materials on our website.

The above photo comes from Ellenville, NY and is posted on Hudson River Valley Heritage.

Lesson Summary: Students will work together in groups with a series of photographs documenting various aspects of life in the Hudson Valley region during the past 150 years. The groups will recreate the images in 3D and present their vignette to the other groups. They will then be tasked with determining the nature of the original image.

Through the subsequent discussion, the teacher will encourage students to ask questions about how they interpret images and what those images can teach us about the region's history.

Essential Question(s): Who? Where? What? Why? How? When?

Concept Understanding(s): Developing the idea that images are designed, consciously or unconsciously, to convey meaning.

Vocabulary: Connotation - the suggesting of a meaning by a word or image apart from the thing it explicitly names; describes or represents. What you can imagine. What can you imagine is happening in this image? Denotation - the direct, specific meaning of a word or image as distinct from an implied or associated idea.

What you can actually see. (Give me a list of things can you actually see in this image.)

Suggested Time Frame(s): 40 minutes-2 hours

Narrative: "You have been presented with a series of photographs collected from numerous Hudson Valley archives, covering a period from the end of the Civil War (1860s) to the present day. With your group, you will recreate the image in the form of a still vignette or tableaux for your classmates. You should each pick an individual from the photographs to represent. Use the cropping tool enclosed to zoom in to your chosen individual and study their facial expressions, their posture, the angle of their body in relation to the other people in the photograph. Your group will select a spokesperson to represent you as the rest of the class study your recreation and ask questions to ascertain what/where/when/how/who and why your photograph was taken. When they have come up with a hypothesis you will be able to share with them what you think the photograph is to the viewer. Compare and contrast the two interpretations in discussion with the rest of the class. To help you, the original archival notes filed with the photographs are included on the back of your copy of the photograph. This information can be used to find clues about the picture; establish its location and date and provide further explanation of what purpose the image might have been created for." Supplies Used: Overhead projector/Smart Board/Projector (if possible) Photographs (included, but feel free to substitute them with whatever it is you wish to teach) What Should Students Know At The End of This Lesson: Two terms and their meaning: connotation and denotation. That images can be read, just like words from a page.

What Should Students Be Able To Do at the End of This Lesson: They should be able to distinguish between what they can see in an image and what an image wants them to see.

How do you assess student learning? Repeat the exercise at a later date with student-generated images as part of a larger project. They'll need to be taught librarianship and basic archival protocol. All of which can be part of an overall, ongoing assessment.