Digital Paxton: Digital Collection, Critical Edition, and Teaching Platform

Murder on the Frontier - Lesson 1

Students will read a secondary source that provides historical context for a selection of six images from the eighteenth century. They will then carefully examine each image, using the questions on an activity sheet to interpret the images. Their knowledge will be demonstrated through the completed activity sheets, class discussion, and a written response.

Objectives
Essential Questions
Materials
HandoutsMaterialsProcedure
  1. Introduce the following Essential Questions: 
    1. To what extent did fear of Native Americans develop into racial hatred on the Pennsylvania frontier?
    2. To what extent can the rhetoric of fear entice a population to violence?
    3. To what extent did fear shape colonial perceptions of neighboring Native Americans?
  2. Distribute Part 1 of the Historical Background essay written by Professor Kevin Kenny. You may choose to assign the reading as homework before starting the lesson, and the students can complete the Analyzing and Essay activity sheet to prepare for the class discussion.
  3. You may also choose to "share read" the document in class. This is done by having the students follow along silently while you begin to read aloud, modeling prosody, inflection, and punctuation. Then ask the class to join in with the reading after a few sentences while you continue to read aloud, still serving as the model. This technique will support struggling readers as well as English language learners (ELL).
  4. If you introduce the reading in class during this lesson, distribute the Analyzing an Essay activity sheet after the reading activity. Depending on the students' experience with examining texts, you may choose to model the selection and analysis of the first phrase and, when the class is ready, the answer to the first critical thinking question. For the rest of the activity sheet, you may choose to have the students work individually, as partners, or in small groups of three or four.
  5. After giving the students enough time to complete the activity, reconvene the whole class and discuss different interpretations developed by individual students or groups.
  6. For the rest of the class period you may choose to have the students do the following activity individually, as partners, or in small groups of no more than three or four students. Depending on the time available, you may choose to provide a selection of the images or assign some image analysis as homework
  7. Distribute Penn's Treaty with the Indians to the class along with the Details, Description, and Decision activity sheet.
  8. Model the activity with the class for the first visual image, eliciting answers to the questions through class discussion.
  9. Distribute images #2-#6 and the Details, Description, and Decision activity sheets (1 per image per student or group). The verses from three of the images are provided as well. You may ask the students to include the text in their analysis of the images.
  10. After giving the students enough time to complete the activity sheets, reconvene the whole class and discuss different interpretations developed by the individual students or groups.

Assessment
Using the secondary source and the six visual images, students will select one of the essential questions and develop a viewpoint. They will then write a brief essay response to the essential question that they have chosen and support their viewpoint with evidence from the essay and visual sources.

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