The Dust Bowl
Grade Levels: 3 - 5
Objectives
- Students will use vocabulary related to the Dust Bowl.
- Students will read about the people and events that were a part of the Dust Bowl.
- Students will take notes about the most important information read.
- Students will use information learned to dramatize a television interview of a fictional Dust Bowl survivor.
Materials
- The Dust Bowl worksheet
- Surviving the Dust Bowl website
(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dustbowl/maps/index.html - An Eyewitness Account website
(http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/dustbowl/sfeature/eyewitness.html)
Procedures
- Introduce key vocabulary: desperate, drought, foreclosure, Great Depression, migrant farmers, relief.
- Invite students to work individually or with partners to complete the Dust Bowl worksheet as they visit both websites.
- Encourage students to work with partners to write a script for a fictional television interview of a Dust Bowl survivor, using authentic facts from the websites.
- Have students act out the interviews for the class.
- One student in each pair can be the reporter while the other is the Dust Bowl survivor.
- Set aside time for discussion of the worksheets and interviews.
Assessment
- Use a rubric to evaluate students' ability
to gather and present accurate and important information about the Dust Bowl.
- Find a variety of assessment
techniques to use with this lesson.
Extension Activities
- Choose from a large collection of cross-curricular activities for all grade levels.
- Students can learn more about the Great Depression by searching the Web. Encourage them to explore the site and then write a fact list of the five most important things they learned about this time period.
Standards Correlations
Standards for the English Language Arts
Students:
- read a wide range of literature from many periods in many genres to build an understanding of the many dimensions of human experience.
- adjust their use of spoken, written, and visual language to communicate effectively with a variety of audiences and for different purposes.
National Educational Technology Standards
Students:
- demonstrate a sound understanding of the nature and operation of technology systems.
- use a variety of media and formats to communicate information and ideas
effectively to multiple audiences.
