Last Edited

    I thought I'd share that I am using an album created for a summer workshop of TPS Mississippi, https://tpsteachersnetwork.org/tps-mississippi/statue-of-liberty  to introduce primary sources into the activities of a STEAM afternoon activity program for bilingual kids from first to fifth grade in the Massachusetts Migrant Education Program.

    The Migrant Education Program is one of the partners working with the Massachusetts Council for the Social Studies project, English Learner Collaborations: Extending the Reach of Primary Sources. They invited me to come see how I could fit primary sources into what is meant to be an enriching but very relaxed afternoon program that follows a morning of serious summer school instruction.  I knew I wanted to talk about statues -- there is an amazing statue garden in front of the Dr. Seuss museum in Springfield, MA where this particular summer program is based. I knew some of the students would have been there.

    Dr. Seuss National Memorial Sculpture Garden | Springfield Museums

    There's also a wonderful new statue of Sojourner Truth in our area, where Truth lived and worked for a time with a utopian egalitarian community. I wanted to plant that seed, too. I paired this local photo with the classic Carte de Visite image of Sojourner Truth on which it is based. 

    Sojourner Truth Memorial Committee

    I figured that statues combine Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math. The resources I thought would illustrate that best were the images of the construction of the Statue of Liberty. I decided to start with a read-aloud of Her Right Foot, by Dave Eggers, which makes the point that a) the Statue of Liberty is an immigrant, from France, and b) she is portrayed "on the move", her right foot poised to propel her forward. (It's also got great collage art and a fun narrative voice.)

    She's Not Standing Still': Dave Eggers On What The Statue Of Liberty's  Right Foot Says About America | Here & Now

    But I was under pressure to find a good set of primary sources to go with this exploration -- I needed to find images of the Statue of Liberty's construction, and my main searches in LoC.gov were not producing what I was looking for. Then I thought of the TPS Teachers Network. I searched here, and immediately got what I needed - I primary source set assembled with English Learners in mind: https://tpsteachersnetwork.org/tps-mississippi/statue-of-liberty

    https://tpsteachersnetwork.org/tps-mississippi/toes-of-the-statue-of-libertyjpg

    I picked the images I wanted, introduced the book accompanied by the sources I picked today, and tomorrow students will cut them up and use them to collage with and make their own art, which they will then put together in a book. Because this is story time and crafts, not an academic class, what they learn from the images will be unpredictable. I will be curious to see what they have done when I go back on Wednesday. Maybe I will have some pictures I can share.

    In the meantime, thank you, unknown participants in the TPS Mississippi session of 2020 that focused on the Statue of Liberty - you helped me gather what I needed to make today happen. 

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    Marvelous lesson   Alison Noyes  and good advice about searching for ideas and materials here in the TPS Teachers Network!  I find that there are so many albums holding just the right image I need.

    As for the wonderful toes of the Statue of Liberty you found, a couple of years back I was testing out the new Virtual Reality Statue of Liberty App (article here) and I put her foot in front of the door of our school’s district office.  Quite fun!  Your photo made me remember that explore.  The App is really quite compelling.

    Foot of Statue of Liberty

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     Alison Noyes, you have put together some wonderful primary sources and teaching ideas for statues in general and especially the Statue of Liberty.  It is one of those lessons that will expand and expand depending on the ages and interests and even geographic locations of the audience.

    I really appreciated your sharing that your search for these images took you to the Network.  We have for a long time now, encouraged the participants in our classes to search the Network for sources and strategies but with only minimal success.  This year we decided to add a Network Searching demonstration and a weekly Network Album assignment. We are only half way through the class but the responses have been positive. We will be reporting more in the TPS PD Facilitators Group after the pilot class ends in August.

    I should add that I got the idea for this lesson initially from Enchanted Circle Theater (http://www.enchantedcircletheater.com/teacher-resource/curriculum-library/), and, inspired by the Library's own   Lee Ann Potter , handed out pennies so the kids could visualize the copper color when the statue was built, and the thickness of its copper skin (2 pennies only!). Kids made foil statues after listening to the story using aluminum foil, as suggested on the Enchanted Circle Resource page. 

    I also created a handout with QR codes to let the kids visit a website later using a smart phone. In a classroom setting, that might be used to connect students with primary source links at the Library. For my purposes, I used the handout to link to the Enchanted Circle Theater read-alouds of the books we used, including versions in Spanish where available. QR code handout sample - link to read-aloud recordings on Youtube

    I'll be so interested to hear what the students learned  Alison Noyes  . For the future, you might also like this primary source set curated by  Tom Bober  specifically to go with the book you chose. He also wrote a blog post for AASL Knowledge Quest in which he describes the lesson he developed. 

    Great ideas...I just ordered Her Right Foot so I can add this activity to my other picture book-primary source lessons!

    Thank you so much for the links to Tom Bober's lesson and his primary source set! He is such a great teacher with primary sources, and having just read this book aloud to younger students, I really appreciated his choice to divide the reading in two, and think (and look at primary sources) first about HOW the Statue of Liberty was created, and then in a second reading session, about WHY the Statue of Liberty was created, and its symbolic importance. 

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