The Oregon Trail

The Oregon Trail is a classic cultural studies topic in fourth and fifth grade, and one that we have honed and refined in Cerrito Creek for the last decade. If you grew up in the United States, it’s likely that you too traveled the trail in a virtual simulation with your classmates. If you’re like me, you remember switching out five-inch floppy disks to play the classic Oregon Trail video game on MS-DOS. Try your luck. Can you make it to Oregon?

How does this continue to be a valuable pillar of a social and cultural studies curriculum? Let me count the ways…

• Collaborate with a small group to make critical decisions along the trail. How will you treat the snake bite? Better do some research? How will you purify that water so you don’t get cholera? Better research that, too. What if we don’t get along and can’t make any decisions? You lose time points and won’t reach Oregon before the snow begins falling. You’ll likely freeze or starve or both. Think Donner Party.
• Craft hand-made journals and writing from the perspective of an imagined character living in a faraway time and place. Use cursive to describe the remote bluffs, crowded campgrounds, and close encounters with Native people who were sick and tired of people taking their land.
• Look at the expansion of the United States and the tension building toward the Civil War as new states had to decide whether or not to allow slavery.
• Examine primary source documents to make inferences about life in the middle 1800s.
• Go deeper into the question of “Why do people move,” which has been the foundational, essential, guiding question of our work this year. America is a land of immigrants, movers, and displaced people. The more we understand that, the less xenophobic I hope we will be.
• Who headed West? Was it just white European Americans? Were there African American wagon trains?
• Build a wagon by hand. Drag your friends around in it on a simulation…yes, we have done that numerous times….

The Chanterelle

The second issue of the Chanterelle came out today! Cerrito’s student literary magazine takes a lot of shapes, and this one showcases a wide range of writing, from fiction to memoir to poetry to letters. Enjoy the electronic version, and ask your child to see their print copy. These pieces were drafted in writer’s notebooks, edited by teachers, then corrected by students. That is to say, there are some booboos in there still, but the work belongs to the students! They have been sharing in the Author’s Chair this week, and they are uniformly proud of their hard work.

Have a beautiful week. Go slow, do a good job at whatever you are doing right now, however small.

Homework

• Read 20 minutes, at least.
• Write: one page, open topic, in your writer’s notebook
• Math:
  • 4th grade worksheet due Wednesday
  • 5th graders have a packet, due Friday
• Wordly Wise: you have been assigned the next chapter