The Civil War through a Child's Eye

• Introduce students to the lesson, "The Civil War through a Child’s Eye”.
  • Use the slide show, "Children in the Civil War", to guide and enhance the lecture.
  • Expand students’ understanding of youth’s perspectives of the Civil War by reading aloud excerpts from Jim Murphy’s The Boys’ War: Confederate and Union Soldier’s Talk about the Civil War.
  • After sharing the non-fiction excerpts, lead a discussion on historical fiction. Share book titles that students may have read or know about that are examples of historical fiction (e.g. Across Five Aprils).
  • Provide students with a preview of Paul Fleischman’s Bull Run.

• Establish Readers Theater protocol.
  • For on-line information about Readers Theater and its classroom use, see Resources.
  • For text-based information about Readers Theater, see Resources.
• Introduce characters from Bull Run and assign roles to the students.
• Read Bull Run using Readers Theater.
• Discuss Characterization.

• Describe American Memory collections. For example:

"American Memory is the on-line resource compiled by the Library of Congress National Digital Library Program. With the participation of other libraries and archives, the program provides a gateway to rich primary source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States."

See http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/amabout.html for more details about the number of items and goals of the program.

• Demonstate the use of two American Memory collections.
  • Selected Civil War Photographs
  • Americas' First Look into the Camera: Daguerreotype Portraits and Views, 1839-1862
• Present the gallery of photographs and daguerreotypes to be used in the lesson: Images of Children from the Civil War Era.
• Allow students to select an image of a child to examine and characterize.

Activity Four- Photo Analysis

• Direct students to locate the photograph or daguerreotype of their child, which was selected from the gallery of Images of Children from the Civil War Era.
• Suggest that students print the image from the screen for their analysis.
• Introduce the Photo Analysis Guide. Review the questions in the observation, knowledge, and interpretation columns.
• Have students work individually to analyze their selected image using the Photo Analysis Guide.

Activity Five- Literary Portrait

• Introduce the Literary Portrait Scoring Guide. Explain that the purpose of the literary portrait is to reveal a child’s perspective of the Civil War era. Discuss the criteria for the preparation, content, and presentation components. Stress the importance of using their responses to the photo analysis guide to compose a literary portrait of their character. Emphasize that the literary portrait needs to match the student selected image and the importance of vivid word choice when describing the character.
• Have students write a literary portrait (a first person characterization) of the selected image. Encourage students to identify the character’s physical attributes, age, personality, and other traits that were observed or inferred from the photo analysis.
• Have students share their literary portraits in the Readers Theater format.
• After sharing the literary portraits as Readers Theater, provide opportunities for students to revise and polish the portraits for publication. The student selected photograph or daguerreotype needs to accompany the final draft of the literary portrait.
  • Option 1. Publish classroom volume of literary portraits.
  • Option 2. Publish students' literary portraits on a web site.

Lesson Overview | Teacher's Guide | Student Page | Images