Educators have a new tool to help teach children how harnessing the power of water transformed the West. “The Electric Project": The Minidoka Dam and Powerplant, is a new Teaching with Historic Places online lesson plan developed by the National Park Service and the Bureau of Reclamation. The curriculum provides information about how the Bureau of Reclamation harnessed the raw power of rivers to provide water and electricity to thousands of Western homesteads and towns in the early 1900s. The lesson plan is available at http://www.nps.gov/nr/twhp/wwwlps/lessons/160minidoka/160minidoka.htm.
In the lesson, students will learn how the Bureau of Reclamation built dams and powerplants to irrigate the arid West for settlers in the early 1900s, eventually providing them with a luxury of the era - electric power. This lesson provides information about settlement along the Snake River in Idaho and how irrigation allowed people to farm “reclaimed" land. Students will also investigate how hydroelectric power is generated and how technological advances, like electricity, changed and continues to change Americans’ lives and lifestyles.
“The Electric Project" is the 160th Teaching with Historic Places online lesson plan. This National Park Service series uses places listed in the National Register of Historic Places to enrich traditional classroom instruction and other educational programming in history, social studies, civics, and other subjects. The Teaching with Historic Places website indexes the lessons by states, historic themes, time periods, learning skills, and history and social studies standards to help teachers incorporate them into curriculum.
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Source: Bureau of Reclamation
