 We work with a teaching American history grant called Becoming Historians. It's working with elementary school kids and one of the units of study in the New York City curriculum for fifth grade is this idea of westward expansion and we came up with this We realized that we had a bit of a stumbling block because when you're talking westward expansion It's a pretty traditional model and teachers are doing Oregon Trail and our kids who live in New York City have no conceptual knowledge of what a Plain is or mountain or mountain pass. They have very little understanding even in what happens up river and So while we're getting ready to do this This work around westward expansion and what's out there We wanted to help the kids make pictures in their minds to really have good empathy and historical imagination of what's going on We realized we needed to do some foundational work on mapping So I contacted Elementary school middle school teacher at banks your College of Education Sam Bryan who's done a lot of work on Geography teaching and young children and he does this terrain And it's a generic model with mountains and valleys and you flood it and you can see how Islands are formed from mountains that are connected to the land But then they become submerged and so the kids can see all this stuff actually happening So they're getting that kind of general vocabulary, but then they're also getting specific vocabulary About mountains and peaks and passes and ranges and river valleys and estuaries and all that other kind of language That our children need so we had Sam work with us on the terrain models And then the idea is you go from the terrain model to a map that the children draw a two-dimensional map the children draw of the terrain model they Look at maps of the actual physical world and they trace river routes And they figure out where the continental divide is because you have rivers draining into one ocean or the other And so there must be something high up in between that's causing the water to flow downhill So aha those must be mountains So then you draw in the mountains then you label all the places So there's a lot of really rich background work that takes place it and from that point we went into Maps of the Oregon Trail historic maps from 1843 that we found on that the Library of Congress website and So the kids are doing critical map reading because now they have the knowledge to say oh, it's a pass It's a butte. It's a bluff They're reading those labels on the map and it means something to them because they've seen pictures of it and And a three-dimensional model of it because it's hard for us in the city to take our kids to places that represent these things So then we looked at the Oregon Trail maps and talked about those maps and use the narrow forms to Analyze the map who is the author what was the purpose what was happening at the time? And then we took diaries of people's westward journeys and trace those journeys Along the map so the kids could start making the connection between oh on June 4 July 2nd We passed independence rock and on we went through devil's gate and all those places are labeled on the map So the kids are then tracing The progression of the individual who wrote the diary along the map and trying to get in their head what it's all about