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Teacher's Guide and Resources for the Who's Home? Exercise. [Next]

Who's Home?

Objectives
Lesson structure
Getting Started
Answers
Individual Needs
Follow Up

Objectives
This exercise is the third step students take in a process that includes discovering the location of the house, researching the time period visited, understanding what is happening in the lives of the inhabitants, and presenting the story in the form of a local newspaper.  In this exercise, students are asked to focus on the people who occupy the house. Questions relate to how and what we can learn about them.

The exercise asks students to identify some of the visual and textual clues that inform us about the people we meet in the past.  Students should discover something about each person's interests, and his or her relationships with other people in the house.

There are many people integral to a house of this size, including servants and other staff, that students do not meet at this point. Students will have the opportunity to learn more about this aspect of the house in future modules. 

What skills/knowledge do we expect the student will improve or master by completing this exercise?
Students primarily use comprehension skills through reading both text (Mrs. Hall's Letter, Mrs. Hall's Accounts, Ellen's Diary) and images. Problem-solving skills are strengthened through the process of decoding Ellen's diary.

What pre-requisite skills and knowledge are required?
Students will need to be comfortable navigating a web site through links and managing multiple browser windows. To complete the exercise with Ellen's diary they should be able to Cut and Paste text.

What does the teacher need to do in preparation for the class?
If web connections are slow, teachers should pre-load images by clicking on  Get House Images here or on the Teacher Resources page.

What materials does the teacher need to provide in order to complete the exercises?
None. 

What materials are needed to do supplementary exercises?
Teachers may elect to have students visit the following web sites:
Kodak, explores the history of Kodak in the field of photography;
The Anne Frank site contains a brief history of Ann Frank's life and excerpts from her diary.

Teachers may choose to use the photograph album to explore fashion or as another step in using objects as dating tools. Some good source books include:

Elite Fashions Catalog, 1904. New York: Dover, 1996.
Gernsheim, Alison. Victorian and Edwardian Fashion, A Photographic Survey. New York: Dover, 1981.
Ginsburg, Madeleine. An Introduction to Fashion Illustration. London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1982.

How long will this exercise take?
This exercise can be completed by individual students or students working in small groups  in two forty-five minute lesson periods. Teachers may also elect to divide the class, and have half  look at the photograph album and Mrs. Hall's letter and the other half look at the Accounts and Ellen's Diary. If this approach is chosen, the exercise may be completed in one forty-five minute class period.

Class organization
The teacher can assign students to work individually or divide them into small groups. 

Getting Started
Students should be directed to the Research Center. Here they should go into the Who's Home? exercise and follow the displayed items (which are links) to find out more about the objects they found. The information presented here should allow them to complete the exercise. 

If items are shown as not found then they should go back and take the Visit the Past link to explore the house to find the missing items.

Organizing Students' Time/Interaction with the Site
Students can move through the photograph album by using the directional arrows. The captions should provide information about individual members of the family and their relationships to one another. Mrs. Hall's letter may prove slightly difficult to read (as it is in script), but this may be used as a comment on historical source material. 

 The Mrs. Hall's Accounts should be read here to illustrate some of the other people in the house who have remained hidden from view. 

Ellen's diary should provide a logical puzzle as well as information. Students should use the date of each entry to determine the number of letters to shift (for example, students should type 4 in the letter shift box to decode the May 4 entry).

The For Discussion questions provide a framework for the questions asked in the Who's Home exercise.

Answers

Students must recover at least four clues to discover information about the people of the house.

Individual Needs
Students who complete the exercise quickly can be encourage to create code entries themselves (from Ellen's books) using Ellen's code shift system, and to copy them into an external word processor. They can also invent a code of their own. They can also be directed to the History Notes on photography or Ellen's diary and follow the available links.

Visual learners can spend more time with the photographs, learning more about the family through visual clues. Further questions on dress, hairstyle, furnishings and backgrounds visible in the photographs can be developed to help them flesh out the story.

Follow Up
Students can move on to the next exercise What's Happening?

Students may be encouraged to build their own family tree or the family tree of someone famous (a famous historical figure, a modern show business family, the Queen of England). In each case the tree can be illustrated through images and photographs.

Students may do the Something Extra exercise associated with Ellen's Diary. Students may also take this exercise further by creating their own code and converting their diary entry to it. Ellen's diary can be used for a writing exercise. Students may follow the links to find out more about Anne Frank.

Students may do the comprehension exercise associated with Mrs. Hall's letter. This will test understanding of the letter.

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