1. Introduce the course-length project focus by posing the essential question which frames the investigation:

   How did work affect the American child within a rapidly growing industrial society between 1880 and 1920?

   Tell students that this project is now their job. Their task will be to search and define the work children did and locations of the occupations. The tools they are to use to complete the task are primary sources. Student teams will be creating their own primary sources in the form of a Team Journal throughout the project.

2. Form student teams. Assign no more than three students to a team. Have them determine specific cooperative team roles according to your classroom policy. Distribute Using Primary Sources in the Classroom, which will form the framework for enhancing understanding of resources. The activities in this lesson are designed to make primary sources come alive. Explore and assign one or more activities to each group from this lesson.

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Brief Guide to American Memory
What Do You See? worksheet

1. Restate the essential question:
   
   How did work affect the American child within a rapidly growing industrial society between 1880 and 1920?

2. Use Brief Guide to American Memory to acquaint students with the Library's online resources.

3. Demonstrate the identification, analysis and evaluation of selected primary sources within American Memory. Photographs from Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920 provide good examples of detail-rich images and explanations with links to additional information. Use Child Labor Posters from Documentary Photo Aids, Inc. to display in the classroom and stimulate discussion of perspectives of photography.

4. Perform an evaluation of of one of the child labor posters, or a primary source photograph from American Memory as a whole class activity. Allow open discussion.

5. Distribute What Do You See? worksheets to all teams. Teams should complete at least three worksheets using child labor photographs from American Memory. This activity will serve to stimulate discovery-based discussion within teams and also introduce basic search strategies using the American Memory collections.

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Early Occupations
Team Journal Guidelines
Putting it Together
Resources for Enrichment

1. Using the list of Early Occupations, the Child Labor Posters, and Lewis Hine's photos from Kids at Work by Russell Freedman, each team attempts to identify a trade description for as many occupations as they can within the time the teacher allows. Teams reconvene to help each other compare their occupation lists. Do not expect students to find all occupations.
   Some examples are:
   • coal breaker boy - Coal breaker boys
   • cranberry bog workers - Family from Italian section of Philadelphia working in cranberry bog
   • potato worker - Children working in the potato fields near East Grand Forks, Minnesota.
   • migrant children - Two children of a migratory fruit worker.
2. Provide feedback to help students build a portfolio of useful sources.
   • Teams should designate one student as record keeper.
   • The team record keeper should keep the sources in a Team Journal.

3. Students begin examining regions of the United States for the purpose of linking occupations with regions in which early industrialization occurred. Using the American Memory collection, Taking the Long View, 1851-1991, have teams discuss and complete the worksheet, Putting it Together.
   
   
4. At this point, facilitate the exchange of ideas between individuals and among different teams about:
   

   • what types of jobs children did during early industrialization;
   • why industrialization occurred in certain areas of the United States;
   • why children worked at the jobs they did;
   • how childrens' roles within a family structure might have been influenced by the work they did;
   • team problem-solving at different stages of project development.

   
   
5. Hand out Resources for Enrichment. This will be used in Week Five of the investigation. If your library doesn't have the sources listed, students will need to select their readings and order them from your local library network in advance.

Students conduct a team investigation of the major reforms in child labor during industrialization using acquired investigative skills. Teachers should encourage investigation of text as well as online primary sources.

1. State laws (by 1914 most northern states banned child labor):
   Each team member investigates a different northern state's position on child labor prior to 1914 and after 1914 and reports back to share with their team.

2. Other Reforms:
   After an investigation of northern states' positions on child labor, teams may choose to investigate one additional reform per student and then share what they know.
   • Keating-Owen Act of 1916
   • Hammer v. Dagenhart (1918)
   • Fair Labor Standards Act, 1938

Important: Allow teams to create systems for investigation. They should log all sources in journals, and include brief summaries of discussions.

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Questions for Investigation
Resources for Enrichment
What Search Terms to Use?

Students continue to acquire sources using Resources for Enrichment. They begin to map how they will construct relationships between the sources and Questions for Investigation using the What Search Terms to Use? visual aid.

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Team Journal Guidelines

1. Students develop a preliminary bibliography for their research, in their Team Journal, using proper bibliographic format, and begin to plan how they would like to demonstrate their knowledge about the essential question:

How did work affect the American child within a rapidly growing industrial society between 1880 and 1920?

2. Ask teams: "How will you show me what you know?"

   Teacher offers teams several alternatives for assessment including, but not limited to:

• Write and perform a play illustrating a child laborer's life during early industrialization in America.

• Create a poster that is a biographical timeline for children laboring in the time of early industrialization, including the major child labor reforms. The poster should illustrate how each labor reform might have affected wages, work hours, and working conditions for the child laborer.

• Conduct and record, or enact mock interviews with a child laborer and a union boss.

• Write and share a fictional account in first person of the trials and tribulations of a child laboring in:

  1. the depths of a coal mine
  2. a glass factory