1. Adopt a site.
Activities:
Care for, research, promote, write about, create signage, fund raise, advocate, use as a picnic site.
A small project might involve maintaining or helping to maintain a local site. This could be as simple as mowing the grass and erecting a small sign or marker.
A larger project might be caring for an abandoned rural school site.
Complex school-based projects could include the restoration and maintenance of a rural site, graveyard, abandoned school or farm site.
2. Geo-Caching
3. Photo Identification Project
The photos of people available in any town or region will contain unidentified people.
A major project might be undertaken to identify subjects.
This could involve:
1. Sending home photos collections for parents and grandparents to examine.
2. Placing mysteries on a website and requesting input
3. Making “Wanted Posters” and placing them around town.
4. Occupations : Things Change
Using information from Local Histories, Notable People Projects, and available Photos and News Clips, examine occupations common to settlement era communities and those common today.
5. The Illustrated Timeline – photos, sketches, maps and newspaper clippings.
Assign each group a decade.
6. Up to Date…
Take an early map such as Laurie’s 1876 map or Palliser’s Map and have students add the updates through the decades. Assign each student a date and have him/ her use the appropriate map from the available collection to fill in the changes and / or additions
7. How Maps help us observe Change.
Maps help illustrate how communities change.
a. Maps of railway development illustrate any discussion of how life changed – on farms, in businesses, in villages and towns – as improved access brought more settlers, easier marketing, cheaper and more abundant goods, and easier personal and commercial travel.
b. Maps show how communities responded to improved rail service – in many cases by moving to be along a rail line, in other cases by abandoning locations, and in most occasions by the overnight creation of new centres.
c. A look at rail lines can also initiate a discussion about the changes in farming that improved access to markets brought.
d. A look at maps of early roads can remind us of the tremendous changes that the automobile brought to communities.