In the basement hallway of Overstreet Elementary, roughly 100 fifth grade students are following their own lesson plan this week, offering school’s entire student body a historical overview of a period spanning from the 11th to the 20th century.
Separated into small presentation groups, these Program for the Enrichment of Academic Knowledge (PEAK) students at Overstreet have spent the last month compiling a historical timeline for a class project culminating in a series of presentations. Each day, the student groups give as many as 12 presentations on three featured eras of Western history: the Age of Discovery, which was presented Monday and Tuesday; the Age of Revolution, which was presented Wednesday; and the Industrial Revolution, which is being presented today and Friday.
David Nicholson and Carrie McMillen, who teach PEAK classes at Overstreet, created the history project to challenge the students in a subject they noticed was underemphasized at the school.
“That’s one of the subjects that kind of gets pushed to the side,” McMillen said. “We think it’s important for them to know it, and they don’t know a lot about it.”
McMillen said when the project began, her students lacked even a basic knowledge of history.
“We drew a big timeline on the board and said, ‘Tell us what you know,'” she said. “And it was amazing that several classes didn’t even mention Christopher Columbus.”
Students chose their own research topics and were often forced to critically evaluate information they sourced, McMillen added.
“A lot of times in history, especially if you go as far back as [Norse explorer] Leif Erikson, there’s a lot of things that we don’t know because there’s so many different accounts written down about this thing,” she said.
Agatha Taquino, 10, said she had fun researching and presenting the motivations of the Revolutionary War Wednesday.
“I just really liked it. It was really fun,” Taquino said, “I’ve never gotten to speak in front of the whole school.”
She said among the events she researched, she especially liked learning about the Boston Massacre and Boston Tea Party.
“I learned a lot about the Boston Tea Party,” Taquino said. “At first I thought it was just a tea party in Boston.”
Sebastian Harvey, 10, will present with the Industrial Revolution groups today.
Harvey said while researching his group’s topic, the cotton gin, he was surprised to learn that a single invention could change the course of history. He said he learned that through its widespread adoption in Southern farms, the cotton gin led to a growing demand for slave labor and the rise of plantation farming, which contributed to the division that started the Civil War.
He said he originally though the invention was something completely different.
“I thought the ‘gin’ meant like ‘beer,'” Harvey said.
McMillen said in addition to discovering history, students are also sharpening their presentation skills through the project. She said because students present multiple times to multiple groups, they get more practice than they would with a typical class presentation.
“Especially with some of the explorers, by the end they were beginning to ad lib and say some things that they may not have said in the first few presentations as they were getting more and more comfortable,” she said.
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