Project TELL Interdisciplinary Unit Plans

Areas with an asterisk (*) are required; all other areas are recommended. Template Description

Unit Title*  Fayette:  Our Local Ghost Town
Subject Areas*  Mathematics, Social Studies, English Language Arts, Science
Grade*  8th
Duration/Time*  2 weeks; different subject areas lasted different lengths of time
Overview* Fayette, Michigan, was an iron smelting boom town in Michigan's Upper Peninsula during the 1870s and 1880s.  Five hundred people lived there, and their fortunes rose and fell with the fortunes of the iron market and the Jackson Iron Company.  Today, the town site has been preserved in an historic state park.  This unit illustrates how middle school students can do historical research about such a site using math, science, English, and social studies concepts.

Using electronic and written resources, including information from state historians, and information gathered on a field trip, students study scientific, mathematical, historical, and language concepts as they prepare historical information guides about life in Fayette, an iron smelting village.  Technology tools are used to help them gather, store, analyze, synthesize, and communicate information.  
Mathematics  Scaled map activity                 Historic family budget activity
Science  Science unit plan
English Language Arts  English language arts unit plan
Social Studies  Social studies unit plan
Unit Focus Question(s)*  Can students conduct historical research of Fayette - or, in general, a ghost town - to create connections to the core curriculum?
Integrated Project*  In each subject area, you will create interpretations of what went on in Fayette on a daily basis during its heyday.  These will vary from a map of the old town site to a budget graph for a family to a comparison of how people from different social levels lived.  As a result, you will know much more than the average visitor to Fayette. 

Produce a historical information guide to Fayette, using the documents you have produced in classes and making a booklet by adding a cover, table of contents, and a bibliography.  Imagine that you are producing this for someone who has never heard of Fayette! 

The unit included a field trip to the historic town site.  Before going, students came up with a list of interview questions, culling ideas from research and activities they had already done in different classes.  Here are some examples:  1.  Social studies:  Did you immigrate to the U.S. for this job?  How is your life different here?  2.  English:  Do you like your lifestyle at Fayette?  Why or why not?  3.  Science: What is pig iron?  4.  Mathematics:  How do you spend your money here at Fayette?   At the town site, each student became a Fayette person they had studied and were interviewed as that person.  A team of students made an i-movie of some of the interviews.  This was shown at an assembly for the whole house at the end of the unit.  Students loved this activity. 

Assessment for Integrated Project*  Pages of the Historic Information Guide were created in different subject areas and assessed in those classes.  Rubrics for specific pages can be found in the unit plans for the various subject areas.  The cover, table of contents, and organization were graded in the extension class that is part of our middle school schedule.
Student Samples of Integrated Project*  Rebecca's Historic Information Guide    Kayla's Historic Information Guide
Reflections* Our team had not tried such an in-depth interdisciplinary unit before and were excited about the ways in which students began, without our prompting, to make connections between and among the information in different subject areas.  They operated as historians as they perused primary documents to gather information for math, social studies, and English activities.  The science activity uses secondary documents.  We saw high levels of thinking as they sorted through information for different purposes in different classes and began to make connections with that information as they created pieces in each of the classes.

Our unit was greatly enriched through the assistance of the site historian from Fayette.  This historian helped us formulate and refine our thinking as we planned the unit and made information from the research files at the park available to us.  We feel that our unit is a model for middle school teachers across the country to use as they plan activities around local history.
Resources* We used various technologies throughout this unit.  The Perfect Harbor CD was used with a computer and an InFocus projector.  Students used GPS units for a mapping activity, though they did not use them individually - a guest speaker demonstrated their use and had a few students collect the waypoints.  That same guest speaker demonstrated MapTech Terrain Navigator software.  Students used word processing to write pieces for the Historical Information Guides and inserted graphics into those writing pieces.  For the math family budget activity, students produced circle graphs by hand as we ran out of time to have them create computer generated graphs.  They used the Internet to explore Fayette information.

1.  The Perfect Harbor: An Introduction to the History of Fayette, a Nineteenth Century Company Town  LoonLink Company.  Distributed by Delta-Schoolcraft Intermediate School District.  CD-ROM 2000.  Produced under Project TELL.

2.  "Fayette Historic Townsite."  Second Edition.  Michigan Historical Center, Michigan Department of State. 2000.

3.  www.michiganhistory.org Michigan Historic Center. 2000.

4.  For more information about site visits, group tours, or additional curriculum assistance, please contact Michigan Historic Center, Fayette Historic Townsite (906 644-2711).