A Day in the Life of a Soldier

Adam Matthees
Educ 333: Rierson
Civil War Lesson Plan #4

1. Title: A Day in the Life of a Solider. The students will get an understanding about what life was like for the soldiers who fought in the Civil War.

2. Materials:
- Pencil
- Paper
- Letters from the soldiers
- Cribbage board made by one of the soldiers (Historical Society)

3. Goal(s) for today’s lesson:
- The students will identify, describe, and extract information from various types of historical sources, both primary and secondary.

4. Objectives for today’s lesson:
- The students will gain an understanding of what it was like to be a soldier during the Civil War.
- The students will understand the conditions under which a Civil War soldier lived under.

5. Procedures:
A. Introductory Experiences: (5 minutes)
- Explain that today we will be talking about what the soldiers during the Civil War were going through. Tell the students that the conditions they lived in were not very good and that many soldiers suffered from the cold weather and died from diseases.
- Show the students the cribbage board from the Historical Society that a soldier made while at camp.
- Describe the board and where it came from.

B. Developmental Experiences: (35 minutes)
- Read Soldiers’ Letters from the nps.gov website.
- Discuss what things they notice in the letters.
- Note the spelling of the letter by Francis M. Russell.
- Talk about different things that we read about.
- How soldiers really looked forward to letters and packages
- They couldn’t put X’s and O’s in their letters because they could be construed as code.
- Split the class into groups of 3-4
- Explain to the class that in their groups, they are going to be reading more letters from soldiers.
- After they have read 3-4 letters, they will be writing a letter home.
- They will pretend that they are a soldier for the Union or the Confederates.
- Talk about how the war is going, things they miss and hardships they are going through.
- Hand out more letters to each group; have them share within their group.
- When they are done, they are to hand in their papers and work on other homework until everyone else is done.

C. Culminating Experience (5 Minutes)
- Ask the students what types of things they wrote in their letters.
- Discuss the hardships and conditions that the Civil War soldiers had to live through.

6. Assessment used during the lesson:
Formal: The students will be handing in the letters to home. They will be explaining what it would be like to be a soldier during the Civil War.

7. References:
http://www.civilwar.com/content/category/18/31/43/
http://www.nps.gov/archive/gett/gettkidz/letters.htm
http://spec.lib.vt.edu/cwlove/
http://www.winonahistory.org/

War, Then and Now

Adam Matthees
Educ 333: Rierson
11-15-07
Civil War Lesson Plan #3

1. Title: War, then and now. I want the students to understand the differences in warfare during the Civil War and how it is today.

2. Materials:
- PowerPoint presentation
- Computer
- Computer projector
- Blank white space to project the PowerPoint onto
- Pencil
- Paper
- Scratch piece of paper

3. Goal(s) for today’s lesson:
- The students will acquire skills of chronological thinking.

4. Objective’s for today’s lesson:
- The students will develop a chronological sequence of person, events and concepts in each historical era studied in these grades.
- They will understand what things were like in the past and what they are like now.
- The students will discover similarities and differences in time eras.

5. Procedures:
A. Introductory Experiences: (5 minutes)
- Explain that today we will be talking about the differences between war back in the 1860s and war in the present day. Tell the students we will be looking at a PowerPoint presentation and that they should take notes on a scratch piece of paper, because there will be an activity at the end of the presentation.

B. Developmental Experiences: (25 minutes)
- Turn off the lights and project the PowerPoint presentation on a large space on the wall.
- Show slide of soldiers then and now. Talk about the differences and similarities.
- Hat, weapon, clothes
- Note that the clothes they wore weren’t very camouflaged
- “Why would camouflaged clothes help during a war?”
- Show slide of soldiers’ headwear then and now. Talk about the differences and similarities.
- The headwear used to be just cloth, now they are hard and can protect from a bullet.
- Show slide of weapons then and weapons now. Talk about the differences and similarities.
- They used one shot muskets and guns. The soldiers also used swords and bayonets for close range fighting. Guns are now made for long distances and to inflict higher damage.
- “Why wouldn’t these one shot muskets and close range fighting tactics work today?”
- Show slide of long range weapons then and long range weapons now. Talk about the similarities and differences.
- They used to be able to go a couple hundred feet. Now weapons can go miles. We also have weapons that can travel great distances relatively easily.
- Explain that advances in science have created weapons that can do more damage from farther away.

C. Culminating Experience: (15 minutes)
- Hand out a piece of paper to each student. Have them write a one page paper about why it would have been difficult to fight during the Civil War compared to fighting now.

6. Assessment used during the lesson:
Formal: The students will hand in a one page paper about what they learned in class today. They will explain why things were very difficult for soldiers during the Civil War.

7. Resources:
- http://www.winonahistory.org/