The National Heritage Museum's website has been expanded to include a curriculum webpage. This location will be the home of a collection of original materials created in conjunction with our long-term installation "Sowing the Seeds of Liberty: Lexington and the American Revolution." Generated from the extensive primary source research that also forms the background of "Sowing the Seeds of Liberty," these lessons provide classroom educators with source-based, lively, and innovative units appropriate for primary and secondary school instruction. "Sowing the Seeds of Liberty" opened in April 2007. This cornerstone exhibition was designed to stimulate new ways of thinking about the battle at Lexington on April 19, 1775, a conflict that has long sparked the American imagination. Now, we are eager to acquaint educators all over the country with additional material that supplements the exhibition.
Lexington in 1775: Colonial Life and the American Revolution
The National Heritage Museum’s curriculum development team has created teaching materials for the third and the fifth grades that conform to the Massachusetts Department of Education’s history curriculum framework. The third grade unit focuses in local history. Students learn about everyday life in colonial Lexington by taking on the roles of real children who lived in the town in 1775. Through exploring family life, farm life, the economy, and community life, students come to understand that English colonists living in Lexington wanted to protect their freedom to own land and to govern themselves. The fifth grade lessons build on the third grade units with explorations of slavery in New England, taxation, women’s political participation, and self-government in Massachusetts.
Join the Conversation or Visit "Sowing the Seeds of Liberty"
Please join the conversation about this material through your feedback on our blog for educators, Learning at the National Heritage Museum: Using Primary Sources to Reconstruct the Past or by writing to us at programs@monh.org.
To learn more about group tours of "Sowing the Seeds of Liberty" and other educational programming at the National Heritage Museum, write to us at groups@monh.org.
Illustration by Joe Farnham, 2007
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