July 29, 2015 : Free Land

The Mini Page is a syndicated, four-page tabloid written for young children found each Wednesday in The Denver Post. This issue of The Mini Page is available through the eEdition Archive to registered eEdition subscribers

Click here to download the PDF for this lesson

Activities:

1. Draw a picture of the prairie. Paste newspaper words or pictures of equipment people used to clear their land and grow crops.

2. Find four people in the newspaper you think would be able to survive on the prairie in the 1860s. Explain your choices.

3. In the newspaper, find five appliances that use electricity or gas to help people clean their houses, clothes, or utensils. Now find five other items people could use to do the same cleaning without electricity. What are the advantages of each?

4. How were these important to the Homestead Act: (a) schools, (b) oxen, (c) Daniel Freeman, and (d) Kenneth Deardorff?

5. Pretend your family has just moved to the plains to make a home and work the land. Write a letter to a cousin back home in the East describing your life on the prairie.

Mini Page activities meet many state and national educational standards. Each week we identify standards that relate to The Mini Page content and offer activities that will help your students reach them.

This week's standard:
Students understand that history relates to events and people of other times and places. (History)

(standards by Dr. Sherrye D. Garrett, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi)