Project Description:
"We are in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, and a lot of you I think are worried about your jobs, your pensions, your retirement accounts…" President Obama
When experiencing the economic hardships of today, one must pause to reflect upon the past. What are the realities of life during a depression? Through this project students will take on the persona of real people who lived through the Great Depression. Students will experience the roles that socio-economic status, race, education and geographic location played the lives of the people who lived during this time. This concept will be evident through the literature they read, the creation of a Great Depression timeline, the photography they critique, their monthly character budgets, reflective journals and personal character research.
Its important to know that although the Great Depression has many negative connotations tied to it, out of recession came great invention. As students will see through the eyes of their characters, people became desperate to find supplemental income to feed their families. This created a boom of pioneer engineers who created inventions such as the Band-Aid, the lie detector, Scotch tape, the first analog computer, FM radio, drive-in movies and the jet engine. Another of these great inventions was the Rosenthal Brothers’ Coney Island Cyclone, which debuted in 1927 as one of the world’s first roller coasters and is still in operation today. Students will act as Engineers to determine the linear algebra, laws of motion and geometry elements that are essential for building a roller coaster.
Product: What will the student create during this product?
· Timeline – as a class we will create a timeline of the Great Depression. Each group will be given one historical figure for whom they will design a poster explaining when they lived and how they contributed to history.
· Swing Dance Lessons – Students will participate in a swing dance lesson.
· Character Journals – students will write a first person reflection on the changes the changes that occur in their character’s life each week.
· This Day in History Journals – students will write ten journals from the character perspective in reaction to a historical event, scientific invention, news real, poem, song, radio show, stock market crash etc. *each journal will include a date that should have some significance. i.e. if we say it is March 25, 1935 the student must do some research to find out what happened that day and include it in their journal.
· Literature – students will read The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck and comic books of the era as a class and participate in reading response activities.
· Poetry Analysis – students will read Phantoum of the Great Depression Donald Justice, A Dream Deferred, Langston Hughs , Black Girl Shouting, James Baldwin and compare and contrast the three poems.
· Character Poem – students will write a poem from the perspective of their character.
· Character Presentation – students will prepare a monologue in character and dress as an autobiography of their life and the affect the Great Depression had on them.
· Research Paper – students will research an important invention of the great depression and write a multi-paragraph research paper explaining how Newton’s laws of motion played a role in the inventions success using APA formatting.
· Household Budget – students will complete each ‘month’s’ budget every week depending on what catastrophe happened to them that month. These will be entered into their portfolio and reflected upon on their journal in Humanities.
· Black Tuesday – students will make sense of the stock market. What happened on Black Tuesday mathematically and could/has it happened again?
· Rollercoaster Blueprint – various versions which illustrate students’ ability to plot coordinates on a graph, calculating slope, write linear equations and inequalities and draw 3D shapes.
· Blueprint Required Calculations – worksheets which illustrate students’ ability to plot coordinates, calculate slope, solve linear equations and inequalities, calculate Base Area, Base Perimeter/Circumference, Surface Area and Volume of 3D shapes, determine how scale affects these calculations, calculate mean, median, mode and range, represent the success of the coaster in a ratio and calculate its probability of success.
· Video Diary – which documents the steps the students took to complete the project, the struggles they faced and the ways they overcame them.
· Project Poster – which includes all versions of the blueprint in chronological order with a written reflection.
· Roller Coaster Model – a scaled 3D version of their roller coaster blueprint.
· Photography Critique - Students will view at least 10 different pieces of art and critique it after learning how to critically view artwork.
· Black Tuesday Analysis – students will examine what happened during the stock market crashed known as Black Tuesday and determine if the stock market has or could ever crash again.
· Roller Coaster Physics Research Paper – students will research and reflect on how certain concepts in Physics played a roll in the success or failure of their coaster and must determine how they would use this knowledge to make changes in a full sized Roller Coaster.
Week 1 Character Assignments 8/31 - 9/4
Complete Character Tracking Sheet
Using The Great Depression Shopping List
This is your character info
