One Room Schoolhouse Lesson Plans for Pioneer Day

As a teacher and home schooler, I have created a complete unit of pioneer and early American history lesson plans and activities. Here is a DIY guide to create your own "One Room School House" experience for  your students or homeschool group. 

I was fortunate to be able to rent a one room schoolhouse from our local Blandford Nature Center Interpretive history facility in Grand Rapids, MI, for our home school group. However I have also taught this unit as an in-school field trip using just my classroom. 

-Choose a time period and compile a workbook of information and activities. Familiarize yourself with that time period and be sure your activities are period correct. 

  -Create a flyer to get parents onboard with your "day in a one room schoolhouse" activity. Request volunteers to help you create an environment, share artifacts and prepare an Early America picnic lunch. Lunch should be simple: hard-boiled eggs, cheese and cornbread, pickles, apples, clam chowder, water with dipper. Serve on cloth napkin, checked tablecloth, mason jar glasses.

  -Each student should be encouraged to create an early American costume. This may be simply overalls, flannel shirts or skirt and blouse.

  -Each child should create quill a pen and a "parchment" journal to write in. Make simple journals using brown paper grocery bags for a cover. Insert several sheets of plain paper, punch holes and tie with twine. In times past, vellum was used but vellum is freakishly expensive. You can also assign students to make a hornbook. Slates were commonly used, too. Make slates by spray-painting chalkboard paint (available from any paint dealer) on square pieces of wood. Here are instructions to make natural homemade ink. Make quill pens, ink and hornbooks or journals as social studies craft projects.

-Contact local high school history classes. Request volunteer high school girl students to teach. In early American schools teachers were generally very young and female. Laura Ingalls Wilder was 15 when she earned her teaching certificate and began teaching.

-Assign each girl a subject and time slot that she will teach that subject. Popular early American school subjects included: penmanship, spelling, nature study, drawing, geography, arithmetic, civics, dictation, recitation and reading. Lesson should be simple and last no longer than 20-30 minutes. Some ideas we've used include:

--copy a proverb from from Poor Richard's Almanac

--trace one of these free printable early American maps appropriate to the time you are setting your one room school house. 

--figure sums (arithmetic

--make butter

--explore natural objects: seeds, leaves, fur pelt (natural science)

--draw a tree

--recite a poem (Samuel Taylor Coleridge "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" or Henry Wadsworth Longfellow "The Wreck of the Hesperus" were commonly used.

--Read from McGuffey Readers

--Use early American textbooks. Common textbooks included, the McGuffey Readers series. McGuffey Readers are available online for 1836, 1869 and 1889. Spencerian Handwriting/Penmanship (1848 and 1874). Ray's Arithmetic 1834, Harvey's Grammar 1868) and History/Civics Under God. You don't need to purchase textbooks if you can borrow from your local library or historical society. 

Teachers should create a simple historical costume for the day. Local history museums or community theater guilds may have costumes to rent or borrow. The costume can be as simple as a long skirt, blouse, bonnet and shawl. The girls who participated in my one room schoolhouse events had a wonderful time preparing their lesson plans and creating their costumes. It was a great experience for all of us.

Write the schedule on a chalkboard. Begin the day with the pledge of allegiance, prayer and a song. "Good Morning to You" was a popular one. At recess children can play jump rope or one of these group games. Assign follow up social studies activities to your one room schoolhouse. Here are free printable one room schoolhouse lesson plans. 

  

Free Marketing Lesson Plans, Science Inventions

Looking for a way to teach marketing and business in elementary school, middle school or high school? Here are cross-curricular business math lesson plans with recycling connections. Use these business math lesson plans to teach environmental science in Earth Month. Students design, manufacture and sell inventions made from recycled materials. These marketing lesson plans are perfect for school, homeschool, 4H clubs, scout troop merit badges, Destination Imagination (DI) teams and Junior Achievement clubs. Plug business math lesson plans into a science unit on technology or simple machines. Tie in activities on inventors for social studies, history and biographical literature lesson plans. Of course marketing has plenty of business math and consumer math applications too. These marketing lesson plans include a component on advertising which addresses design, writing and public speaking activities. . Here is a scope and sequence for each content area. This lesson covers the higher order thinking skills of analysis, application, synthesis and evaluation.

Cross-curricular lessons plans: Graphic Design: The student will design and sketch a product or tool of his own invention.

Cross-curricular Science Technology: The student will plan, organize and build products or inventions using only materials found in a recycle bin. Make these in Earth Month to reinforce eco-friendly design. These may be primary inventions (for example, a hand can opener) or secondary inventions (a development or improvement on primary inventions, for example an electric can opener.) All inventions or products should be creative or unique in some way.

Environmental science: The student will create inventions using only found, reclaimed, repurposed or recycled materials. Students might clean up the playground or empty recycle bins for Earth Month.

Art: The student will decorate or embellish the invention to make it more aesthetically pleasing and marketable. She will also design promotional materials--posters, flyers, product commercials or bill boards. Promotional materials should be made from recycled materials for Earth Month.

Literature: The student will choose an inventor in history to profile. TSW read a biography or autobiography on his inventor and explore the inventor's background and body of work. Ideally the inventor would somehow be associated with the type of invention that the student is creating.

Social studies: The student will develop a poster, timeline or DVD or presentation showing how other variations of her products or inventions have been used in history or around the world.

Writing: The student will write a short one minute commercial advertising her product or invention. Commercial should demonstrate how the invention is used, how it will benefit consumers and why they should buy it.

Theater/Drama/public speaking: The student will perform her commercial and demonstration for the class or school. Teachers, give extra credit for costumes, make-up and scenery (a free standing cardboard box backdrop and props made from recycled materials ties in well with Earth Month.)

Music: The student will compose a simple musical jingle to advertise his product. The student should emphasize that inventions are made with recycled environmentally friendly sustainable materials.

Math: The student will calculate the costs of production, establish a retail price, develop a marketing strategy and sell the product at a student "Market Day." She will keep track of sales, discounts, extra costs, etc. She will fill out a teacher-made balance sheet.

Use as many or as few of these components of the unit as you wish. You might opt to take one or two pieces and expand them to fit another lesson or activity that you are doing. These business math lesson plans and activities can be tweaked to fit almost any age of student or size of group.