The following activities are meant to give readers an idea of how I plan to implement this unit in my 7th grade classroom. I have tried to illustrate activities that will be both pivotal in the unit as well as easily adaptable to your needs as a classroom teacher with your own students and your own given subjects
Lesson 1-What is a Map?
My first days of implementing this unit will focus on the reintroduction of maps and mapping to students. I know with my students, the extent that they will have used or thought much about maps will be linked to either Google Map directions or projects in their Social Studies class. I want to reintroduce maps to students to help them realize that maps really are still a part of our lives.
Initially, the class will start with some discussion questions around maps. I will give students time to work in small groups and answer a few questions about maps. One note taker will be assigned to record responses from the group as they take time to respond to some basic questions. What is a map? When is the last time you used a map? How many different kinds of maps can you identify?
Students will take five to ten minutes to discuss the questions before they come back together to have a class discussion on the current state of maps in seventh grade. I will ask students to identify maps in the room. In my classroom there is a pull down wall map, an emergency exit map (for fire drills and code reds) and a small globe on my desk. I will ask students to identify what the maps are good for and help them recognize that maps have many functions.
Next, I will share some images of older maps with students and utilize a technique introduced to me and several other teachers through the Yale British Art Museum. The technique entitled he MOMA method encourages students to look at artwork and make observations that help all of the students come to some interpretation that all can find useful. It is a fairly straightforward and useful technique that begins with allowing students to take a few minutes to silently view the object. After a few minutes of silent observation, the teacher asks simply “What do you see?” And the students make visual observations of the artwork. The teacher reiterates what is said and if students have any commentary on what they see the teacher follows up with a simple, “What makes you say that?” This simple technique of observation and sharing allows students to make valid observations and starts them onto a path of simple interpretation. I will begin the lesson with an old, but complicated map from our course, the Hereford mappa mundi. Housed in Hereford Cathedral, this unique medieval map is like no other map in the world. Invite students to explore the map at the interactive 3D Hereford site (themapamundi.co.uk). Students will be able to identify animals and myths, cities and countries as they explore the map. After observing and discussing that map, I will go to the other extreme with a NASA map of the Milky Way. The interactive map, located on the NASA website and made in partnership with ESA (the European Space agency) shows the far reaches of the galaxy and beyond.
After utilizing these two book ends, I plan to set up a sequence of different types of maps for students to observe. We will look briefly at ancient maps, subway maps, timelines, Google Earth and, again using the simple method of observation mentioned above, begin to realize the depth and scope of maps in today’s world.
Finally we will close the session with an activity I call “map it.” In this activity students will be working in groups. I will have an assortment of locations written down on cards for each group. Among the locations will be, the school grounds, my bedroom, a favorite place, my bus route home and others. I will put five minutes on the clock, drop the place card down in the center of each group’s table and allow them to quietly get to work. Once students have finished, I will ask them to share with the other groups. For example five students from group one who were mapping “My closet” will get up and share with the rest of the class, challenging other groups to guess the location of the map. Once map locations have been identified, students will be invited to share the details of their maps with the rest of the class. The homework, which concludes the day’s lesson is to draw a map of the students’ neighborhoods.
Lesson 2- Maps as Stories
In this activity I am attempting to help students make the link between maps and the stories that they can represent. Much like the day or two I took to reintroduce maps to students I would like to explore for a day or two how we use maps to tell or compliment stories. An amazing place to start with this part of the unit is with the journey of Marco Polo.
I will continue with the day’s activity by seeing what students know about Marco Polo. With my seventh graders I suspect that I can call out “Marco” and will receive the swimming pool classic response “Polo” from much of the class, but without some prompting I suspect the conversation will end there. That is when I will show the students a few images of Polo, pull down my wall map to introduce his journey and begin to share with students one of the greatest travel writing feats ever undertaken. Marco Polo’s journey, like so many journeys that we all take throughout life, was an exciting and colorful one in which he reported on geographical challenges and unique cultures that many of us to this day have not been exposed.
Part of the reason I want to start with Marco Polo is that Polo’s incredible journey across Asia spanned thousands of miles, several countries and scores of different cultures. Marco Polo was one of the world’s first successful travel writers, which is what I want my students to imagine becoming in this unit. There is a lot of material to use regarding Polo’s journey as well. In this part of the unit I will begin introducing the book to students by looking at my wall map to introduce Polo’s route, reading some sections of the book to students to let them get a feel for the work, and sharing the Public Television documentary In the Footsteps of Marco Polo with students. This incredible film, produced in the early 90s, follows two travelers from Queens New York, who set out to retrace the 25,000 mile journey from Venice across Central Asia, to China, and back. It is a beautiful film in which the travelers not only try to follow Polo’s route accurately, but actually emulate his mode of travel and attempt to visit the exact sites that Polo wrote about in his book. For seventh grade I will utilize clips from the roughly ninety minute film, but depending on the age group you are working with and what your unit entails, you may want to use more or less of the film. Either way, I highly suggest you watch the entire film.
As I share quotes from Polo’s book, I will invite students to imagine what it was like to travel with Polo on such an incredible journey, and will let student know that at the end of this section of the unit I will ask them to create a journal entry as if they are on the journey with Polo.
I also suggest, depending on what age you are working with, that you read Italo Calvino’s classic Invisible Cities which is a fictional depiction of the conversations that may have occurred between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, the Mongolian Emperor who laid claim to so much of the land that Polo was able to travel. There are a thousand different ways to incorporate this book into this part of the unit, and can also provide some creative background for you and your students.
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Finally, here I will ask students to perform a task that will be the foundation for our reading and documenting of the life and times of Phineas Gage; I will ask students to become travelers themselves and write a journal entry alongside Marco Polo himself. This is the sort of writing that we will be doing as we read Phineas Gage, so here with Marco Polo, I will attempt the same. Students must first take on a character, or point of view to write from. Perhaps they will be a fellow traveler, a camel, a grain of sand or Marco Polo himself. What observations can they make about one of the cities or geographic formations, a dessert, the mountains, an ocean ride, the huge lying Buddha? Again, this is practice for students as they prepare to accompany Phineas Gage on his journey. Encourage students to illustrate the journal entries with pictures and maps. Have students share out their journals as a class before moving onto Phineas Gage.
Lesson 3- Following Phineas Gage
In this lesson we will begin utilizing our background knowledge on maps and travel writing to follow in the footsteps of Phineas Gage. A note for teachers utilizing the unit: here is where your modifications and tweaking of material will probably be most useful. This unit could just as easily be called Mapping the Life and Times of Sacajawea or Mapping the Life and times of Elie Wiesel, of Tommy the Train, of Walt Whitman or a number of others.
After a brief introduction to life in the US in 1846 (the year of Gage’s accident) including a map of the United States, we will begin reading Phineas Gage as a class and creating our journals which will help us to map the life and times of our hero.
Much as we practiced during our Marco Polo exploration, I will challenge students to take on a persona during their journal writing. The life changing accident that sends Gage into a very different life adventure occurs during the first few pages of the book. He is a bloody mess and his life, brain and personality have changed in the blink of an eye. I take time here to make sure students really understand what has just happened and how miraculous it must have been to witness this freak accident.
And so my official first assignment in the Phineas Gage Journals is to decide what persona students will be and describe (or summarize) the accident and the brief aftermath in which Phineas is loaded into an ox cart and brought to the doctor’s office in the nearby town.
I will brainstorm possible personae that students can take on, reminding them that they should be thoughtful about figuring this out as they will continue to develop the persona throughout Phileas’s journey. I will point out that their character is basically summarizing what we have just read through their unique point of view, and I will also ask students to add a map to their entry as will be the case in most of our journal entries in this unit.
Before letting students get to work we will review some of the maps that we have discussed as we frontloaded this unit. The possibilities in this first journal entry are as endless as they have been throughout this unit. A more basic approach may be to create a map of Vermont, highlighting Cavendish, the town where the accident took place. Another approach may be to map the path of the tamping iron as it entered and exited Phineas’ head, still another more creative map might be a mind map, which could show Phineas’ thoughts before the accident, or the persona’s characteristics. By including these three elements of journal writing and summarizing, creative writing and mapping, students will understand the approach we will be taking with our journal writing as we move forward through the unit. As always, invite students to share their work in small groups or pairs.
