Students in fifth and sixth grades are eager to explore and discover. Imaginative, interested in the way things work, and aware of the world outside their own experiences, they are ready to learn new things. Sixth grade is an excellent time to study history in depth. Students are enthusiastic “time travelers,” willing to ask questions about the past and follow clues to the answers.

The Turns of the Centuries: Everyday Life in a New England Town, 1680-1920, takes advantage of students’ developmental readiness to explore the evolution of social history in Deerfield at three century turns. The unit is inquiry-based, focused on teaching students how to “read” an array of primary and secondary source materials. Learning to ask questions of these sources, and to think about what they can and cannot tell us, encourages critical thinking skills and academic independence. As the study progresses through the centuries, students gradually build a strong knowledge and skill base that enables them to do independent research using primary and secondary source materials. Through the study of Deerfield, students also learn about the causes and effects of change in daily life throughout the region and the country.

Above all, The Turns of the Centuries: Everyday Life in a New England Town, 1680-1920 unit makes teaching and learning about history interesting and engaging. The material culture of previous generations – the “stuff” that people made and left behind – is compelling. Students’ own curiosity is engaged time and again as they immerse themselves in times past.

The unit was developed as a part of the Turns of the Century project, in collaboration with the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association (PVMA). It makes use of source materials from the PVMA collections and library and other historic resources in Deerfield. Photographs of all of the source materials which are utilized in this unit have been digitized and stored in a digital library accessible through the PVMA web site. The unit builds upon the fifth grade Turns unit and prepares students for the eighth grade unit. All of the Turns of the Century curriculum units are designed to satisfy grade-appropriate requirements of the Massachusetts History and Social Science Curriculum Framework.

In the The Turns of the Centuries: Everyday Life in a New England Town, 1680-1920, students learn the basic skills needed to “read” primary and secondary sources, including a broad array of documents, maps, images, and buildings, to see what they can reveal about the characteristics of everyday life in Deerfield, MA over three century turns. At the same time, they learn the historical background of each era so that the source materials will be understood in the proper context. Then, they use what they have learned to analyze the ways the town has changed since its beginning. The unit progresses chronologically through the three century turns, covering the periods 1680-1720, 1780-1820, and 1880-1920.

As they progress through the research at each “turn,” students are required to be increasingly independent. They gradually build their research skills and knowledge base so that they are able, by the third “turn,” to do independent research projects which utilize primary and secondary sources and draw conclusions which can be supported by the research.