character traits of cooperation, diligence, courage, and leadership

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1 Properties Title: Mystery Type: Lesson Plan Subject: Social Studies Grade Range: 3 Description: The Roots of our Democracy: Boycotts and Protests Duration: Minutes Author(s): Alexandra Goldman Instructional Unit Content Standard(s)/Element(s) Content Area Standard SS3CG2 The student will discuss the character of different historical figures in SS3H2 a. Describe how the different historical figures in SS3H2a display positive character traits of cooperation, diligence, courage, and leadership b. Explain how the historical figures in SS3H2a used positive character traits to support their beliefs in liberty, justice, tolerance, and freedom of conscience and expression c. Explain how the historical figures in SS3H2a chose when to respect and accept authority. TAG Standard Advanced Communication Skills 10. The student supports and defends his/her own opinions while respecting the opinions of others. Advanced Research Skills 5. The student gathers, organizes, analyzes, and synthesizes data from multiple sources to support or disprove a hypothesis. Higher Order Critical Thinking Skills 11. The student draws conclusions based upon relevant information while discarding irrelevant information. Summary/Overview The focus of this lesson is to solve a mystery to determine how the protests, strikes, and boycotts of migrant farm workers in California effected the lives of the rest of all Americans. 1

2 Enduring Understanding(s) At the end of this lesson the student will understand a. How nonviolent protests, strikes, and boycotts helped expand the rights in our democracy for migrant farm workers. b. How producers and consumers rely on one another. Essential Question(s) How are producers and consumers interdependent on one another? Concept(s) to Maintain Democracy means government by the people All citizens are entitled to the same basic civil rights The economic relationships between producers and consumers is a crucial one. Evidence of Learning What students should know: a. The United States Constitution awards rights to all citizens. b. In our nation s history, not all individuals were awarded the civil rights they are entitled to. c. Protests and boycotts are ways of showing one wants a change to current conditions. What students should be able to do: a. Describe how the United States Constitution protects the rights of all individuals. b. Explain how nonviolent forms of protest are more effective than physical forms. c. Explain the benefits producers and consumers provided one another. d. Supports and defends his/her opinions while respecting the opinions of others. e. Gather, organize, analyze, and synthesize data from multiple sources to support or disprove a hypothesis. f. Draw conclusions based upon relevant information while discarding irrelevant information. Suggested Vocabulary 2

3 Producer Consumer Nonviolent Protests Boycotts Strikes Interdependence Procedure(s) Phase 1: Hook 1. Poll the class on who they think is plays a bigger role in an interdependence economic relationship: producers or consumers? What do these two groups have in common? How do both groups assist in making money? What would happen if a producer or consumer goes missing from the relationship? How would the group who is still around get the job done? Phase 2: Examine the Content 1. Share the Mystery. Distribute Summer of Hunger to students. After reading about the narrator s latest grocery store trip, students will work individually to develop a list of tentative hypotheses. 2. The teacher will read aloud chapter 4 of Cesar Chavez biography Success! The students will be provided some background knowledge related to nonviolent protests led by Cesar Chavez for the migrant farm workers in the 1930 s. 3. Knowing how disappointed the narrator and the family were with the lack of produce the parents have decided to go speak to the grocery store manager to see what happened to all the produce. The manager at the grocery says that he has contacted the United Farm Workers association to see why they never sent their order into the store this week. Divide class into investigative teams. Each team will develop a team hypothesis for the disappearing produce mystery. 4. Present the Clues. a. Distribute the clues for Meeting 1. Students will analyze the photographs of farm workers who produce the fruits and vegetables. As a group, the students will list observations they make while looking at the photographs. 3

4 b. Distribute the clue for Meeting 2. Students will read the newspaper article Young Migrant Workers Toil in U.S. Farms and underline clues that relate to their group s hypothesis. c. Distribute the clues for Meeting 3. Students will read an exchange of letters between a disgruntled migrant farm worker and the farm owner. d. Distribute the clues for Meeting 4. Students will use the photographs to explain what nonviolent protests mean, and what some examples of this are. 5. Based upon patterns/data found within the clues, each team will refine its hypothesis and propose a solution to the mystery. Phase 3: Synthesis Activity 6. Each investigative team will create a picture and summary to explain how the relationship between producers and consumers are interdependent. The teacher will assign half of the class to focus on the producer and the other half to focus on the consumer. 7. Class Discussion: How can producers effect consumers? How did you observe the working and living conditions of the migrant farm workers? In what ways did the farmers stand up for themselves in order to make a change? Did the migrant farmers living conditions effect the rest of the population of the United States? How so? Summarizing Activity Wraparounds In a circle, each student will take a turn telling Something I will use from what I learned today Something I will remember from today A significant AHA from today Resource(s): Fanning, Karen. Young Migrant Farm Workers Toil in U.S. Fields. Anchor Text(s): Fitzwild, Abigal. Cesar Chavez (2006). American Heroes. Houghton Mifflin Company. Boston, MA. 4

5 Technology: Handouts: Handout 1: Summer of Hunger Handout 2: Meeting 1 Handout 3: Meeting 2 Handout 4: Meeting 3 Handout 5: Meeting 4 Handout 6: Solution Handout 7: Synthesis Activity 5

6 The Summer of Hunger Every Sunday, you and your family go to the local grocery store to get your groceries for the week. All week long you are creating and adding to your list the items that you will need to purchase on Sundays. Your weekly Sunday trips are important, because it gives you the food you need for three meals a day, six days a week. Sundays are you and your family night to eat out at a local restaurant. In the afternoon, you and your parents are loading into the car to head over to the store. You are making a list in your head of some extra treats you would like that you hope your parents will allow. You did get a 95% on your math test, so surely that deserves some extra sugar rewards :) Your parents park the car, you jump out, and run to get a cart. Your first stop is always in the produce section to pick up the fruits and vegetables needed for the week. However, upon entering the produce department, you notice that it looks like this: 6

7 What in the world is going on?????? Where is all the food???? You have been coming to this store at the same day and around the same time every week. What is different this week than the past? Where did all the produce go? List at least three hypotheses that could explain why the grocery store shelves are bare:

8 Working as a detective with your Investigative team, select one hypothesis for the disappearance of the produce. Investigative Team Hypothesis 1. List of Tentative Hypothesis

9 Mystery Clue 1: Look at the pictures of the producers who plant, grow, and care for the fruits and vegetables sold to grocery stores. With your group, make 3-5 observations of what you notice about the pictures. Photo Credits: =lnms&tbm=isch&sa=x&ei=9l3ivnqmkiu_ggtugihacw&sqi=2&ved=0cayq_auoaq 9

10 Mystery Clue 2: Read the following article from the United Farm Workers weekly newspaper. This week, they decided to run a feature about the life of a migrant farm worker. While reading, underline the clues that help you infer the lifestyle of migrant farm workers during the 1930 s, and help you support your group s hypothesis. Young Migrant Workers Toil in U.S. Fields By Karen Fanning Source: Scholastic News Online Santos Polendo remembers his first day of work like it was yesterday. He was just 6 years old. "The weather was terrible," says the 16-year-old migrant farmworker from Eagle Pass, Texas. "I had blisters on my hands. My back was hurting. My head was hurting. I never thought I was going to make that my life." Yet, for the past 10 summers, backbreaking farmwork has been part of Santos's life and that of some 800,000 other children in the U.S. The same poverty that drove young Santos into the onion fields of Texas continues to push generations of other American children into a similar life of hard labor. Migrant children travel with their families throughout the United States to work in agriculture. They journey from state to state, from one farm to the next, following the crop harvests. They toil, day in and day out, on America's farms, to help their struggling families survive. Santos, however, is eager to break that cycle of unending labor. With the help of organizations like Motivation, Education, and Training (MET), an organization that services more than 1 million migrants in 48 states, Santos and thousands of other migrant children may no longer have to drag their weary bodies out into the fields. "We have tutors and instructors here that help migrant children with their assignments," says Roberto Oliveras, MET Youth Coordinator in Eagle Pass. "We provide field trips to college campuses. We tell them through education, through 10

11 studies, they will be able to do other things, have other choices of jobs. They don't have to be out in the fields. They don't have to migrate." Lost Education In many ways, Santos is lucky. His family only works during the summer months. However, many other children are forced to leave for the fields as early as April. Often, they don't return to school until October or even November. Each May, the school year ends early for 15-year-old Dora Perez so that she can make the 30-hour drive with her family to Minnesota. There, they spend the summer harvesting sugar beets. "The work starts before school ends, so we just have to go," says Dora, a freshman at Eagle Pass High School. "We don't like going up there, but we need the money to pay our bills. We have to help out our parents. The family does better when everybody's working." Once they return to school, many migrant farmworkers struggle to catch up with their classmates. In order to make up for the many months of lost education, they are often forced to attend classes after school and on Saturdays. While most parents like Santos's want a better life for their children, a typical farmworker earns $7,500 a year or less hardly enough money to support a family. As a result, parents are faced with a difficult dilemma: keep their kids in school or send them out into the fields. "The families are so poor, they need their kids' income in the fields," says Reid Maki of the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs. "Farmworkers do not make a living wage. Without pooling the resources of all the family members, they cannot live. They can't get by. They can't pay their rent and utilities, so they desperately need their kids to work." Year after year, faced with the prospect of falling further and further behind, many children become discouraged and stop attending school altogether. In fact, experts estimate as many as 65 percent of migrant children end up dropping out of school. "Many of them drop out, not because they don't want an education, not because their parents don't want them to have an education, but because it becomes such a 11

12 futile endeavor for them," says Ellen Trevino of MET. "They're tired. They're worn out. Everything seems to be stacked against them." All in a Day's Work For Santos and Dora, the workday begins at 6 a.m. and ends at 6 p.m. There is little time for the usual summertime activities that most American kids take for granted. After returning home from work, they eat dinner, take a shower, and go to bed to rest up for yet another 12-hour workday. Rarely do they get a day off. In many cases, child farmworkers must endure sweltering temperatures, as there is little shade to shelter them from the heat. Too often, they also suffer from on-the-job injuries. Santos recalls an incident when he accidentally stabbed himself with a pair of scissors. Dora remembers cutting her foot on a hoe. "I didn't have my shoes on and tripped on it and slashed my toe," she says. I didn't feel it until I saw that my sock was stained with blood. I had a pretty bad cut. It was real deep." For Dora, however, there was no trip to the emergency room. Like most farmworkers, she was forced to fend for herself. She wrapped up her foot and rested in the family's car, then returned to work the next day. Among the many dangers children face on the job are pesticides. Migrant children regularly labor in fields that are sprayed with these toxic chemicals, which can cause skin irritations and breathing difficulties. Their small, undeveloped bodies are especially vulnerable to the harmful effects of pesticides. "We have airplanes spraying pesticides over our heads," says Dora. "We're out in the fields, and all of a sudden, here comes the airplane throwing all the pesticides at us. We get rashes from the pesticides." A Better Life With another summer behind them, Dora and Santos are back in school. In the afternoons, both teens attend the MET Youth Center, which provides local migrant children with computer training, homework help, and visits to area college campuses. For Santos, MET has made a difference. 12

13 "We have teachers here that can help us," he says. "They helped me with projects, and they helped me to study for some tests. My Cs and Bs turned into As and Bs, and everything was thanks to MET." Now Dora and Santos can look ahead toward a brighter future, one that includes college. As for Santos, who has already worked in Minnesota, New Mexico, South Dakota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, California, Oklahoma, Ohio, and Iowa in his short life, he looks forward to settling down with a family of his own. "I've never gotten any rest," says the high school sophomore, who would like to study art in college. "I'm studying all year in school, then in the summer, I have to work. What kind of life is that? If I have kids, I will never even show them a field. They can see a field from a book. I want them to grow up and have a better education than I had and be somebody." 13

14 Mystery Clue 3: Please read an exchange of letters between a disgruntled migrant farm worker and the farm owner. What text evidence can you find in the written letters to explain why there is no produce in the grocery stores? May 2, 1930 Delano Grape Farm Please send to the attention of: Mr. Barnes, Owner for Delano Grape Farm Mr. Barnes, I am writing you today on behalf of myself, my family, and the other hard working individuals you employ on your farm. Lately, because of the extreme heat, the lack of water, and small living spaces, it has become increasingly difficult for us to complete the work needed to produce the grapes and sell them to our consumers. The unclean conditions of the home got my wife sick. My children haven t been able to drink clean water for 10 tens. The broken bathrooms have created an unsanitary working and unbearable living conditions. It is unfair to expect an individual to do all of the work for you, and receive next to nothing in return. We are people who are citizens of the United States, and are entitled to the civil rights the United States Constitution allows us to have. Therefore, please consider this letter today your official notice of our strike. The workers of the Delano Grape Farm, with the lead of Mr. Cesar Chavez, will not do any more work for you until we are treated with some respect. If you need to find us, you can find up joining Cesar Chavez on his 340 mile march from Delano to Sacramento. Sincerely, Disgruntled Farm Worker May 6, 1930 Delano Grape Farm Please send to the attention of: Disgruntled Farm Workers To all the farm workers of Delano Grape Farm, If you are not able to complete your work, then you cannot get paid. Consumers are not paying money to buy the farm s grapes, so no business is being completed. Therefore, if you would like better living conditions, your work must pay off to make money for the farm. There is nothing more that needs to be said at this point. 14 Sincerely, Mr. Barnes

15 Mystery Clue 4: Look at the pictures of the following nonviolent protests. Using your observation skills, what you do you observe the term nonviolent means, and how does this relate to the mystery of where all of the produce has gone? 15

16 Revise Team Hypothesis & Solution to the Mystery 16

17 Synthesis Activity: Explain how the relationship between producers and consumers are interdependent. Producers Consumers Interdependence Relationship 17