Upper Elementary
Winston Churchill: His Life and Times
This curriculum is aimed at upper elementary students who examine images and documents of Churchill and in doing so, define their own concept of his life and how it relates to today. The curriculum takes the students from Churchill’s earliest years to today. The curriculum can be readily modified to fit the needs of individual classes and students.
The students are divided into teams to develop a book of pictures, documents, charts and maps that was hypothetically donated to the Winston Churchill Memorial. There are no descriptors on the pages to tell the students what they are viewing. The students will ultimately place these materials in chronological order including proper labeling.
On the second day, the students are provided information about the book but not in the right order so they have to match the information to each image. The students will have to create captions for the book with information provided. The information is longer than what would comfortably fit on the page, so they will have to synthesize the materials, putting the necessary information into their own words for the book, along with the time period. The students will compile all the images in chronological order.
On the third day, students will develop a second book that would tell someone about their current world. Each student should bring in one image, which might be a picture of themselves or newspaper or magazine article about something they think is important in the world right now or a document (photocopies are fine) that could be placed in a new book. They need to write their own caption which explains why it might be important for someone to “discover” this 100 years from now.