Reading Online - Articles -- Teachers' Voices: Patty Taverna and Terry Hongell

Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad: Bringing a Second-Grade Social Studies Curriculum Online

Nicole Strangman
Reading Online Editorial Assistant
CAST, Inc.
Peabody, Massachusetts, USA

	When something else that a child has read outside the classroom comes up, we'll relate it to the timeline. (Patty and Terry also made an online "biography clothesline".) At the end of the year students have a much better sense of history. By then, they've at least begun to develop an awareness of when things have happened in the past.
Nicole:	You have a lot of great kids' work on your website. Can you tell me about the process involved in generating something like the timeline?
Patty:	We always start with a piece of literature; we read aloud to the children, then we all read aloud together, or the children pair up to read. That's how we begin any project, with reading and a great deal of discussion to identify the dates and the most important events in the person's life. We do lots of experience charts together. For example, the timeline piece began as a chart, a listing of the important events in Harriet's life. From there we talk about who might be interested in doing what part of the project, and we decide whether we're going to do it individually or if we're going to do it with a partner.
Terry:	That may depend on how many dates or events there are and how many children there are in the class. Sometimes we pair up strong students with weaker students; sometimes we'll pair a student who happens to be quite artistic with someone who finds drawing difficult.
Patty:	The drawings always start out as rough drafts. For this part of the project Terry comes to my classroom and while the students are working, whether independently or with a partner, the two of us circulate and ask them about what they're including in their illustration, why a component is there, and what else they need to include to make it accurate. We also encourage them to utilize the resources in the classroom: the other trade books, primary source materials, visuals (maps for example), and websites. We pull in everything we possibly can to help them put their ideas together.

Selections from the Harriet Tubman timeline

Nicole:

How are the print illustrations transferred to the computer?

Terry:

We do the illustrations in the classroom on paper first so that the technology does not get in the way. We encourage the students to include as much detail as possible, then they bring their drawing to the computer. They know what it is that they want to draw, and they just need to figure out how they can do that on the computer. Frequently, we get a bit of collaboration where some of them say "I can do that. Let me help you. Let me show you."

Nicole:

The vocabulary quilt is also wonderfully done. How did that come about?

Patty:

The vocabulary piece came at the end of last year's study, when the children were very familiar with the subject matter. I think we approached it by asking the students what words they thought were important or what other things children should know about Harriet.

Terry:

Then we discussed how to do it. I thought their drawings were really good and that it would really be a shame to not use their original drawings. So, we worked out the details before we asked them to draw the images. We decided we wanted a small image with the definition under each picture, so we gave them small paper to start with. It is easier for the children if they know how big the image will be on the Internet. We were going for the look of a quilt, and we wanted the picture to really stand out, so I gave each image a black background and tried to match the border I had used on the original large quilt. I think the effect is quite dramatic.

I always involve the children in the design process. We talk about their ideas and my ideas; I show them samples as we go along, and we discuss the pros and cons of each choice. The final choice is always a joint decision.

The beautiful Harriet Tubman vocabulary quilt. Each vocabulary word is hyperlinked to a student definition and illustration.

Nicole:

In a project like this one, how do you manage students' different strengths, needs, and preferences?

Terry:

We usually decide the summer before what our major project will be. In terms of the literature, we make sure that we find more than one or two biographies; we always gather a collection of books.

Patty:

We generally have a book to do together, but we spring from there to many different versions of a biography. This means finding materials at a range of reading levels so that we meet the needs of all of the children in the class.

And as we're collecting materials we're looking for related audio and videotapes. We also make charts recording the children's research. They are displayed in the room and referred to frequently.

Terry:

When I go into a bookstore I comb through the children's literature section, and I usually come out with something that we don't have and that is aimed at an ability level that I think we could use. My collection continually grows.

Patty:

We also try to offer opportunities other than just text for those children who need different ways to internalize the information: primary sources, compact discs, and recordings that take a book a step further.

Terry:

And we have students who have 'actually visited Harriets home and brought back pictures, brochures, buttons, and posters to share with the class.

Patty:

Many of the materials that I have in my classroom Terry has duplicates of in her classroom, so whether in my room or the computer lab, the students are surrounded by print, diagrams, portraits, and maps.

A selection of student illustrations from the vocabulary quilt

Nicole:

It's clear from looking at the student work on your website that you also offer opportunities for children to express their knowledge in different ways.

Patty:

There is always a text piece and an illustrated piece. Again, we try to tap into the children's strengths and the medium that they are more comfortable working in.

Nicole:

The Harriet Tubman project is just one of the projects you do each year. How do these projects build on one another?

Terry:

The first major project that the children are involved in each year is usually Harriet. Later in the year, they study John D. Rockefeller, Sr. After the Harriet project, they have a feel for what other classes have done. They begin to push themselves to create another very interesting piece. They can look at a website and see its strengths and weaknesses. I think that when we did John D. Rockefeller, Sr. we had a lot more of the children saying, "You know, we need to have this piece--the artifact. How can we do that?"

They were able to make the transfer from what they learned to what was important to share with other people. They take all of those skills and carry them with them.

I think that Harriet is really a building block for the children. They will go on to do other projects, and what I've seen is that as fourth graders, these same students are able to write down initially all of the things that they think are worth putting into the website.

When the kids who first did the Harriet Tubman site went back and looked at their drawings there were such giggles. They were saying, "Why did I put that there? Why did I do that?"

And I think that if we look at the drawings and examine their actual computer work, those have become more sophisticated too.

Nicole:

What kind of an impact has the website had on other students?

Terry:

I got an e-mail the other day from the older sister of a young student. The older sister is in high school, and she said that she had been trying to help her little sister to understand about Harriet Tubman. She said, "I figured I knew everything there was to know. I was so surprised that I found out something new from reading your work!"

You would really be surprised. We hear from adults; we hear from little children and high school students. It's amazing the number of high school students who say they didn't think second graders had anything to teach them. I share that e-mail with my older students, and they realize that their work has had a huge impact on others. I think that is something that they are very proud of.

Nicole:

Have your year-to-year experiences led you to change the project in any way?

Patty:

Depending on the year and the group, we may focus on a different piece or a different skill. We're not doing the same activities. The content is basically the same, but the way that we approach it may be different.

Terry:

Frequently, the students' interests drive us to maybe stay longer than we might necessarily have planned on the project.

Patty:

They become so interested in Harriet. She is a character that, for some reason, grabs second graders. One year, we started out by doing several chapters in "Wanted Dead or Alive: The True Story of Harriet Tubman" orally as a group. But because they were so interested in the book and seemed to grasp the concept of summarizing easily, I decided to have them work with partners to summarize the rest of the chapters (summarizing is a skill that is appropriate for second graders). So, in a sense, the students drove their own learning in a more independent manner. I don't know that I necessarily would have had them do the summaries on their own had I not felt that they were familiar enough and able to tackle the project.

Terry:

Also, the second graders know more about using technology now than the second graders did 4 years ago, so I can teach more advanced skills now than I taught then.

Patty:

Another thing that has changed in the way that we are teaching is that we frequently use the Internet. As we're doing research or working on a timeline page we often have Terry come down and work with us in the classroom. When a question comes up, Terry will go to the computer and pull up a website, and we can read more about the topic, try to find the answer to a question. That's certainly a plus and a difference in our approach to getting information to the children.

Terry:

I can remember when we were studying Vietnam and started out by reading Angel Child, Dragon Child by Michele Maria Surat. The children were so taken by the literature, and they couldn't understand why this little girl had so much difficulty adjusting to life in the United States. I think I spent 3 or 4 days combing the Internet looking for images of Vietnam. I knew that I wasn't going to find anything text-based on the Internet, because there wasn't really a whole lot at the time in children's literature. But we were able to put together a selection of images that the students could look at together in order to get some idea of what it was that made Vietnam so different from the United States.

Student-written chapter summaries for the book "WANTED DEAD or ALIVE" The True Story of Harriet Tubman

Nicole:

So the Internet has really made a difference in this project!

Terry:

My favorite story from Harriet Tubman is that of a little girl named Joelle who volunteered to do the Emancipation Proclamation for the vocabulary quilt. She took a piece of paper, and she sat down. She sat there for a good 5 minutes, and then she came back to me and said, "I know what it is and I know what it did, but what did it actually look like?"

I said, "Joelle, let's see if we can find out."

We went to the Library of Congress website. We searched for a picture of the Emancipation Proclamation. What we found was a picture of Abraham Lincoln actually reading the rough draft surrounded by some of the members of his cabinet. And Joelle said, "That's it. That's what I'm going to draw."

Lo and behold, she came back with a picture of Abraham Lincoln sitting at a table with a pen and paper. It was wonderful because we were able to pull up everything that technology offered there in a second-grade classroom and show a student Abraham Lincoln--what he looked like, what the room looked like, and a sense of the importance of what he was writing.

Nicole:

Is there anything that you found particularly challenging about this project?

Patty:

The technology part of it.

Terry:

The whole website, really! I had created our school website over the summer. But I had never put together anything like this. So, as we went along, for me, everything was a learning experience; everything I did was new.

Sometimes Patty comes to me with an idea--the quilt is one of them--and she'll say, "I have this great idea! How can we do something like this?"

And I'll go home and try to figure it out. I'll come back with something that looks wonderful at home, but when I put it up on the computer something will be a little off--the color isn't quite right or we are on an older monitor and it doesn't show up at all. So, for me, those aspects continue to be challenging, but that's what makes our work so interesting for me.

Patty:

Also, working together is something that we've grown into. It gets easier. We've gotten better at being able to identify what is more appropriately showcased on the website as opposed to a book format "published" and displayed in the classroom.

Nicole:

What about the rewards that this project has had for you?

Terry:

For me, it's watching the excitement as the children work. It's amazing to see 7-year-olds sitting on the floor, going back through a text, looking for a reference. I don't think that's something we would have seen without the website. When they know that people are going to be examining their work they're concerned about making sure that they are accurate. And I think for Patty and I, on a professional level, it has benefited us as teachers.

Patty:

It's a wonderful learning opportunity. It stretches all of us, because we are analyzing content and thinking about the quality and purpose of it.

Terry:

There are many memorable moments that we have had with the children over the years. I still remember quite vividly that first year when the project was finally finished and we were going to look at the finished product. I walked into Patty's room with a cape on, pretending to be Harriet Tubman. Unfortunately, they all knew me, but they played along beautifully. Between Patty's classroom, which is at one end of the building, and my classroom, which is at the other end of the building, we had placed quilts indicating stops on our very own Underground Railroad. Whenever we made it to a new stop the kids would stop for a moment and say, "Oh, we're safe here! We're safe here!"

For the last part of the journey, I had one of our eighth graders be our last conductor and lead us to the computer room. And I can still remember when we came through the door one of the kids saying, "We made it! We're in Canada!"

And that's when I knew that it really didn't make a difference whether anyone ever saw what we had done. These kids had internalized all of this and were truly excited about learning, and that, for me, was the most important thing.

Poems written by second graders about Harriet Tubman

Nicole:

What would a teacher visiting your site find that would be helpful to him or her?

Terry:

I think the most helpful thing is that Patty and I worked together to chronicle how we did the site and why we did the site so that a teacher who visits it can go through the hows and whys and pretty much recreate the same thing in their classroom. That's an additional piece that we both thought was important, because often you run across things and you wonder how you could do it.

Nicole:

Do you have any other advice for teachers who are interested in doing something along the lines of your project?

Patty:

I think working with another person is a great way to do it. The conversations and analysis with another person is what fine-tunes it. We have deep discussions about the purpose of our websites. We also talk a lot about how we're going to do it--how we're going to get a concept across to the children.

Terry:

I think that computer teachers often search out classroom teachers who are interested in things like this. So if you're a classroom teacher and you want to try it, find your district computer person or your building's computer person, and tell them you'd like to try creating a website. I think opportunities are available.

Nicole:

You've won tons of awards for just this project alone. Does the Miss Rumphius award hold any special meaning for you?

Terry:

It's quite an honor to be recognized by your peers. It's given us a chance to get to know Don Leu [professor of education at University of Connecticut, USA, and moderator of the RTEACHER listserv, issuer of the Miss Rumphius Award]; he's terrific.

Patty:

We admire Don's work and we appreciate the award very much. I think that one of the pieces that is most satisfying for me is when we get e-mail from people who keep going back to the Harriet website. The Harriet Tubman project was really our firstborn. She's 5 years old now, and I think, "Well she's special to us, but maybe people are getting tired of her."

But as we speak, we are still getting e-mail saying, "I visit your site every year, and I'm so pleased that there is a new piece." It's exciting and rewarding--the fact that people do go back, that they appreciate the pieces that we are adding to the site.

Terry:

We have also had visitors make suggestions for additions.

Patty:

Which is terrific! Because it usually comes from a classroom teacher who has actually taught Harriet to his or her students.

Terry and I spoke at an IRA conference in Syracuse back in November. When a woman in the audience realized who we were (she didn't know us personally) she said, "You're the Harriet Tubman ladies!"

It's so much fun when people recognize us from the website.

Nicole:

How does the finished website compare to what you initially envisioned?

Terry:

I think it came out better than I thought it would. The visual presentation of the children's work is very important. No matter the quality of the work, it's important that you sell it properly. Coming up with the combination of graphics, the background, the little runner that goes across the screen when you get an answer right on the quiz. I think all of those pieces came out better than I had thought or hoped. As we do each new piece, it brings the site up another level. I knew it was good and was going to get some attention, but the attention we have received was beyond my expectations.

Get a correct answer on the Harriet Tubman quiz and you get to enjoy the fun of this animated runner.

Patty:

I don't think we could have possibly envisioned the website we have now. The project grew as we got into it and were working on it. When we realized how vested the students were it challenged us to continue to think about ways to challenge them. It has grown and changed every year. Each class adds something else to it.

Terry:

And it's actually become a lot more sophisticated over the last few years. I'm better at what I do. The kids are better at what they're able to do at the computer. We've discovered that we can be more demanding about what they do.

This interview is very timely because sometime by the end of the week we'll have broken one million visitors. I have a chart outside my classroom and every couple of hours I've been writing down where the counter is at. I can see the middle school students stop in the hallway and say, "Wow! We're almost there! We're almost there!"

Editors' note: As of this writing the Harriet Tubman and the Underground Railroad website has had 1,262,183 hits!

Citation: Strangman, N. (2002, May). Harriet Tubman and the underground railroad: Bringing a second-grade social studies curriculum online. Reading Online, 5(9). Available: http://www.readingonline.org/articles/art_index.asp?HREF=voices/taverna_hongell/index.html

Nicole:	What was the curriculum content that drove the Harriet Tubman website?
Terry:	Patty teaches social studies using children's biographies. The same skills that you teach with Harriet Tubman one year you use to teach Benjamin Franklin the next year. The skills don't change, just the vehicle you use to teach those skills. Summarization is one skill; character analysis, comparing and contrasting, order and sequencing are others.
Patty:	We always bear in mind the skills and concepts that are appropriate for second graders. We do a lot of trade book reading, and we pull in as many additional resources as we possibly can. We also do a tremendous amount of writing as an outgrowth of the reading. The skills Terry mentioned are important skills for 7- and 8-year-olds to be practicing. And they are practicing with material that they are very, very interested in. Another goal for our projects is to help our students to really get a sense of who a historical figure is and a sense of his or her place in history. It's very hard for young children to understand time. We always do timelines, because they are a very concrete way for children to put events into perspective. In my classroom I have a clothesline, and as we're reading a person's biography, a card goes up with that person's name, date of birth, date of death, and a picture representing something significant about him or her. All through the year, the timeline is growing. We constantly refer to it.
Patty Taverna's "clothesline" timeline helps her students to understand time and put historical figures into perspective.


Patty Taverna		Terry Hongell