Winter Garden Heritage Foundation
Experience History Field Trip
Classroom Exercise
Classroom Exercise: Significant Events Timeline
Grade levels appropriate: Fourth and Fifth
Objectives: What will students know and be able to do as a result of this lesson?
Students will use a timeline to:
- understand the categories of years and decades;
- to understand the order of occurrence of several events of local significance;
- to draw conclusions about social and economic transformations.
Sunshine State Standards addressed in this lesson:
SS.A.1.2.3: The student understands broad categories of time in years, decades, and centuries.
SS.A.4.2.1: The student understands the geographic, economic, political, and cultural factors that
characterized early exploration of the Americas.
SS.A.5.2.4: the student understands social and cultural transformations of the 1920s and 1930s.
SS.A.5.2.5: The student understands the social and economic impact of the Great Depression on
American society.
SS.A.5.2.7: The student knows the economic, political, and social transformations that have taken place in
the United States since World War II.
SS.B.2.2.1: The student understands why certain areas of the world are more densely populated than
others.
SS.B.2.2.2: The student understands how the physical environment supports and constrains human
activities.
SS.B.2.2.4: The student understands how factors such as population growth, human migration, improved
methods of transportation and communication, and economic development affect the use and onservation
of natural resources.
Materials needed: Significant Events Timeline exercise
Significant Events Timeline
Introductory/background information for teachers and students:
Lessons in Unit 5 of the 4th grade Scott Foresman Social Studies textbook that would be helpful
background information for this lesson include:
- The Land Boom, p. 265
- The Boom Ends, p. 268-9
- The Great Depression, p. 273
- The Depression in Florida, p. 274
- World War II, p. 274-5
- Changes in Trasportation, p. 289
- Commercial Tourist Attractions, p. 305
Lesson process:
Students, working alone or in small groups, cut out the event squares and glue them to the
appropriate boxes on the time line. Using the completed time line, students then discuss in
small groups, possible answers to the questions. After giving the small groups time to
discuss and answer the questions among themselves, the teacher poses the questions to the
class for discussion. During discussion, the teacher leads the class to observe:
- The importance of the arrival of the railroad in the settlement of Central Florida;
- What it was like to live during the Great Depression;
- How World War II gave people jobs and pulled the country out of economic
depression;
- The effect of interstate highways.
|
