Lesson 1
Materials Opaque Projector, several pictures of modern families. Include a variety of race and family structure.
Objective To introduce the concept of family as a basic form of human organization, with special emphasis on its role as a basic unit of production; producing things that are needed in
the larger society.
Discussion
Elicit a definition of “family” (there are numerous ways to define it, but the idea is a group of persons living in one household under a parent or two, who form a social or economic unit.)
Discuss what a family needs to maintain its members. What does it do to satisfy those needs? Modern families, unlike those of former times, generally perform services of some kind of worth to society as a whole. Earlier families tended to produce things, both for their own needs and perhaps to sell or barter.
As the pictures are shown discuss how these services fit into the larger needs.
Culmination
Each student draws a picture of his own family group (those who live in the same home with him) and lists under each family member what services each performs. Children, of course, are “in training” to provide services to the larger economic unit, while “houseparents”, if any, serve the family so it can contribute more easily.
Lesson 2
Resources
Park Ranger or volunteer geologist (if you don’t have one in your school population, School Volunteers will help you find one). Handbook,
East Rock Park
, borrowed from the New Haven Public Library.
Objective To study geologic terrain, and some of the history of East Rock.
Activity
Walking trip up East Rock to summit. On the way up, note the rocky face and discuss its composition. The handbook gives a fine short summary of the mountain’s geological history and composition. At the summit, from various viewing points, identify the harbor, the river, West Rock, and the extensive wetlands between. Discuss the features that would attract Native Americans, Quinnipiac and Algonquins, who were area inhabitants. As you return through the wooded flatlands below, known as College Woods, point out that numerous Indian tools and artifacts have been found in the area of the tennis courts.
Lesson 3
Resources
Flint arrowheads or other Native American tools, if you can borrow some. If not, the resource book mentioned above,
East Rock Park
, has pictures of tools found in College Woods Park, and another fine book,
The New England Indians
(see bibliography), has many more in reproducible form.
Objective To learn about New Haven’s Native Americans, especially their family life and family economic roles as producers, using artifacts of their culture.
Discussion
Elicit complete description of objects. Include shape, color, texture, materials, etc. Progress to speculation on uses, and which members of the family might make it. What might a people who made and used such objects be like? What can we assume about the nature of their culture: What might their family structure be?
Follow up
Assign reports on family, tribal structure, products, trade practices, etc. Take special note of what Native Americans of these tribes might be do as their chief form of subsistence. As to family structure, books say child-rearing practices among them were quite permissive, which can lead later to interesting comparisons with European culture.
Lesson 4
TRIP to the Peabody Museum
Objective
Visit to Native American artifacts on display there. Discussion should center on objects as products, made by the family for survival. Each student should pick one object or article of clothing, sketch it, note facts concerning it, and on return to class, write a full description of it. A pamphlet can be made by gathering these together with an appropriate cover.
Meanwhile, reports should be in progress. Request a model or drawing for each. Algonquins had unique domed wigwams and winter long houses.
The New England Indians
(mentioned above) is excellent for this purpose because it shows details of manufacture.
Lesson 5
Report Day Hear reports, display models.
Lesson 6:
Materials Slide projector, slides of Colonial era families (a set of slides is filed with the Institute office, to be lent on request with this unit).
Objective To introduce the European settlers and their family life and structure, to be compared with Native American families.
Procedure
Using slide,
The Gore Children
, (painting, c. 1755), elicit first a complete description of the painting: principals, clothes, approximate ages, positions relative to each other. Include anything they carry; the direction of their gazes, backgrounds, colors. Try to establish who is most important (in this case, the boy, who is standing while his sisters are seated, is clearly dominant). Progress to a discussion of male and female roles (the boy is holding a riding crop; horses are a masculine pursuit, while the girls are holding flowers). You could progress to the
Angus Nicholson Family
(c. 1792) where the father is clearly dominant. Follow the same procedure. You could point out that at this time in history, though there was clearly affection, children were regarded as property of their parents, who had almost total. power over them, even choosing mates, etc. The children in the Paintings, of course, were of the privileged class but nonetheless children had clear roles as “producers”—the boys helping with the estate or father’s business; the girls supervising household servants or producing food or clothing. Poor children then might be indentured servants or farmworkers; the girls might be sent into domestic service. Education for girls was limited to “dame School” where they learned reading and writing and simple math. Later, if they were wealthy, they might learn needlework, singing, drawing, and other feminine arts. Poor girls might never learn to read, Discipline of children was often very strict; the poetic injunction to “spare the rod and spoil the child” was taken seriously. This can be contrasted with gentler Native American child-raising customs.
Lesson 7
TRIP to Center Church, New Haven, and the New Haven Green.
Objective
To learn more about Colonial life, especially religious aspects affecting family.
Items of special interest are the crypt under Center Church, with its well-preserved stones. You could point out the many early deaths of children from disease. Upstairs there is a handsome Tiffany window showing Davenport and Eaton on landing in New Haven. Your guide will discuss the many quaint customs of Colonial church life. Outside, note the grave of Theophilus Eaton and memorials to the three judges, Whalley, Goffe and Dixwell. Discuss their story.
You should also point out features of the Green in Colonial times: the stream in the corner, the whipping post, the militia training ground, the grazing cattle. You might want to copy the famous Brockett map which shows where Davenport and Eaton had spacious house plans and a special walkway to the Green. You might also point out that all around and behind Center Church are still buried hundreds of people, now forever anonymous, and though their headstones are now in Grove Street Cemetery, the bodies of 200 years of colonists are still there.
On return to class
Students could begin a journal about life in one of the 8 squares around the Green before the revolution, to be added to each day for two weeks. In language arts we will read excerpts from Sarah Knight’s 1704 contemporary journal about her trip to New Haven from Boston. It’s available from the public library.
Lesson 8
Materials
A borrowed spinning wheel with its owner (Mrs. Fenno Heath in our Class ) ready to demonstrate.
Objective
To learn about products of eighteenth century families, both as consumers and as traders. We will see how fibres are spun into thread or yarn and how they are woven or knitted into clothes. Any other of the crafts of the time—butter making, candle dipping, quilting, etc.-can be added or substituted. Students are to report on one way in which a family of that time could supply its own needs. (In New Haven, oystering, fishing, weaving, cobbling, coopers, blacksmiths, and many more are identified on the Wadsworth map of 1748, which the Historical Society also has).
Lesson 9
TRIP to Pardee Morris House, on the East Shore.
Objective
To learn more about an 18th century household, and family life, through this historic setting.
Things to see and discuss: a formally planned herb garden; colonial kitchen with domestic equipment, trundle beds for children, furnishings, note lack of closets, ballroom, etc. Some docents will let the children hold or demonstrate some of the kitchen equipment.
A later separate trip might be one to Fort Hale, not far away and connected by Revolutionary War history with the Morris House, which was burned in Tryon’s raid. There is the reconstructed “Black Rock” fort on the shore, the unique sliding drawbridge, the “moat” and the bunkers. The view of the harbor there gives you a chance to talk about the fisherman-oysterman economy that sustained the town for generations. You can also tell the story of the “phantom ship”, which is the subject of two handsome 19th century paintings usually on exhibit at the Historical Society.
Lesson 10
Materials
books on tombstone art and the art of rubbing. See bibliography for two fine ones. My favorite is the Friswell pamphlet, which gives a long list of the carved symbols found on early gravestones. It lists more than sixty symbols, and your class can have fun trying to decide what they mean. Many had solemn inscriptions and warnings about human mortality, often in verse. Some had portraits of the deceased. The Friswell pamphlet also gives a method of “profiling” stones by their basic shapes that helps to determine their approximate age.
Procedure
Reproduce the symbols pages and some of the inscriptions; the students can save them for referral later when they write epitaphs. Demonstrate the technique of rubbing in the classroom, showing how you can pick up any recessed design from a smooth surface, including basic texture of the surface, etc. The Gillon book has some charming rubbings. Having completed this introduction, the class will be ready for the next lesson.
Lesson 11
TRIP to Grove Street Cemetery
Materials
appropriate for rubbings; rolls of masking tape, strong bond paper, soft black lumber-marking crayons or charcoal.
Available in the gate house are maps of the cemetery, with the many stones of special prominence marked. This is a place where the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries meet in the stone avenues named after trees.
Even the gateway is a symbol in stone, inspired by the temple of Karnak. Around the wall to the left are hundreds of stones that once stood on the Green around Center Church. They were moved during the nineteenth century. The students can look for symbols, including death angels, and for interesting epitaphs. These somber mementos can be compared with the more recent but more weathered marble stones of the nineteenth century (air pollution affects marble sooner than slate or sandstone). The symbols and inscriptions of the nineteenth century are quite different.
Our rubbings will be displayed at school, and will be the inspiration for the language arts period, when students will write an epitaph for themselves, and create a symbol to be carved on their own imaginary stone.
Lesson 12
Materials
Slide projector, Opaque projector, slides of 19th century paintings of family(Earl, 1804 and Field, 1840), Book,
New Haven
,
An Illustrated History
(see bibliography; it’s widely available in local libraries)
Objective
To reveal the changes in New Haven culture and family life brought about by the rise of technology and the coming of the industrial age.
Procedure
Show slide of the painting by Ralph Earl, “Family Portrait” (c. 1804) and later “Josph Moore and Family” by Erastus Field (c. 1840). With each, take the class through the same three steps as with the Colonial era slides: description, deduction, and speculation, What differences are apparent in relationships? What are the children like? Can any changes be noted in the way children are accepted in the family? Point out that between the two paintings a great deal has changed around them: factories have arisen, and poor women and children often work in them: Trains and canels and steamboats to New York widened the world. Children—at least those of middle and upper classes—are allowed to be children, not miniature adults. The status of women, too, was on the edge of change. But the father was still the dominant, most powerful figure in the family.
Next, using the opaque projector and the book
The Illustrated History of New Haven
(see bibliography), show pictures of mid nineteenth century New Haven. Eli Whitney’s radical methods of manufacture—interchangeable parts—have had astonishing descendants. New Haven entrepreneurs have been agents of change too, inventing the first telephone switchboard, asphalt paving, the cotton gin, the truss bridge, and many more.
Lesson 13
TRIP, to Eli Whitney Gun Factory, now known as the Eli Whitney Museum. Inside are models of the many innovative machines and inventions by New Haven people.
Objective
To see and appreciate production skills as they were, and to understand how factory production changed society and families with it.
Through previous arrangement, it has been possible for students visiting the museum to make something there, usually an old-fashioned toy. Discuss how Whitney’s use of mass production techniques helped change society. Nearby is a reconstructed bridge modeled after Ithael Towne’s truss bridge, and the Whitney barn, also nearby, is beautifully put together.
Lesson 14
Materials paperback copy of McGuffey Reader, Grade Four or Five. Copy of
Tom Sawyer
. The McCuffey Readers were standard in countless American schools in the nineteenth century; they were frankly Christian in basic slant. But through poems, stories, homilies, and fables, they had a deep influence on the ethics and attitudes of hundreds of thousands.
Procedure Begin by reading the chapter in
Tom Sawyer
in which Tom manipulates classroom customs to find a seat by Becky. This gives a feel for the classroom of that time Then conduct a day’s reading and math as in a oneroom schoolhouse. Girls and boys are seated separately. Assign reading lessons from extracts from McGuffey. Assignments should include learning verses by heart and higher groups helping lower. Be tough with the ruler (though you can’t hit anyone, however tempted) and sharp with the tongue. Conduct a couple of spelldowns and/or mathdowns.
