March 20, 2019 : Orphan Trains

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. Make Orphan Train trading cards. Draw a train on one side of each card. Then write one fact about the train on the back of each card. Share your cards with friends. Shuffle the cards. Then each person takes a card and reads the fact off the back. Now discuss that fact with your friends.

2. Draw a picture of a small suitcase on a piece of paper. Paste newspaper words and pictures of items a child might have taken on the orphan train.

3. Pretend an orphan train is coming to your town. Make a notebook of news stories and ads that show why your community would be a place the children would like to live.

4. How were these important to the orphan trains: (a)Children’s Aid Society, (b) Charles Brace, (c) New York City and (d) orphanages?

5. Pretend you are a reporter for a newspaper in the Midwest in the mid-1800s. Write a newspaper story about an orphan train that is coming to your town. Tell your readers how and why the children are coming.

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 how historic events, people, places and situations contribute to our understanding of the past. (Social Studies: Time, Continuity and Change)

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