What do the Camden, Morrisville-Eaton, and VVS School districts have in common with Fort Stanwix National Monument? Teachers! This past summer, Todd Donnelly, Jennifer Pierce, and Karen Schmidt worked at the fort developing materials for teachers to use in their classrooms that would also prepare students for the New York State testing.
The project, funded through a partnership with the Madison-Oneida BOCES Foundation and the National Park Service, created a ready-to-use packet of information for the classroom. The packet contains materials such as lesson plans, maps, a vocabulary list, DBQs and CRQs at the 4th, 7th, and 11th grade levels. A variety of reproducible documents are also included for use by teachers in their own lesson plans.
Throughout the project, the teachers focused in bringing as many subject areas as possible together. This has created a cohesive interdisciplinary unit with Fort Stanwix as its core. Some of the suggestions for subject areas outside History include a Math lesson on measuring the distance for cannon firing and an ELA lesson on journal writing from a soldier's perspective.
If you would like to learn more about this project, get a copy of the packet produced this summer, and see some of the student projects based on the lessons, visit Fort Stanwix National Monument on April 22nd. Secondary teachers are invited from 3-4 p.m. and Elementary teachers are invited from 4-5 p.m. For any questions about the project or to reserve a space for the workshop, please call Ranger Valerie Morgan at (315) 336-2090.
Source: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service
