This post is based on, Kindergarten Historians, co-authored by the Library of Congress Teacher in Residence, Earnestine Sweeting and a Library of Congress 2011 Summer Teacher Institute participant, Teresa St. Angelo.
In a Sunday Book Review of three books about trains, Bruce Handy describes the 2013 Caldecott Winner, Locomotive Written and illustrated by Brian Floca:
“Locomotive” is unusual for a picture book in that it is intended to please a fairly wide age group, which means it may also frustrate some readers or listeners. Older children will appreciate the wealth of detail and history, while younger ones will be entranced by the appropriately chugga-chugga rhythm of Floca’s free verse and his abundant use of sound effects (playfully emphasized with well-muscled, 19th-century-style typefaces): “Now comes the locomotive! / The iron horse, the great machine! / Fifty feet and forty tons. . . . / Hear the clear, hard call of her bell: / clang-clang! clang-clang! clang-clang! / Hear the hisssssssss and the spit of the steam! / Hear the engine breathe like a beast: / huff huff huff!”
Read This!
Locomotive, written and illustrated by Brian Floca. Ask students to explore a copy of the title and ask them what they notice.
Audio name pronunciation with Brian Floca
Brian Floca introduces and shares some of the backstory for creating Locomotive. Click here to play now.
Meet the author, Brian Floca in an interview about his Caldecott winning book Locomotive!
Use primary source documents to discover how trains were used to transport goods. Share the following short films. Ask students to discuss what they saw. Ask students to provide evidence and make connections.
A 1903 film titled “Collecting mail.” The subject is the movement of mail by the U.S. postal service. As the film begins, two types of mail boxes on a pole on the corner of a street can be seen. In the background, away from the camera position, are people going by on foot, as well as horse-drawn and electric streetcar transportation. At the end of the film, a man wearing the uniform of a mailman is seen approaching the mail boxes. He unlocks the boxes and removes the mail from both the small and large boxes.
A 1903 silent, black and white film, Train taking up mail bag. The subject of this Postal Department documentary is “snatching” the mail bag from the suspended post by the railroad mail clerk. As the film begins, a man climbs the steps leading to the device that suspends the mail bag in the air. A train can be seen in the distance approcaching the mail bag. At the end of the film, the mail bag is just being snatched from the suspension device.
Provide each student a copy of the image, Men working in a railway mail train. Ask students to, “Circle what you see that helps you guess where you think these men are working.” Analyzing primary source documents allows students to discover, prove, or investigate, their ideas. The thinking routines they use to make observations and reflections when analyzing visual primary sources are transferred to other academic areas.
Using a carousel protocol, students will express their thoughts and ideas around a set of three early 1900s photographs of a horse-drawn U.S Mail wagon at a railway station, unsorted mail at the post office, and a girl handing a letter to the mailman in “A letter to papa”.
Assign students to groups of three to review the primary source documents. Allow 5 minutes to review the primary source and fill in the organizer and describe the similarities and differences between mail delivery then and now. When time is up, rotate the groups to the next document, read what the previous group has written and add new information. The process repeats until all groups have been to each primary document.
To model the mail delivery observed in the primary sources, ask each student to create his or her own postcard using the 1904 stereograph “A letter to papa”. Each student should write a message on the postcard, which will be mailed home.
What is a stereogram? Well, according to wikipedia, it’s an optical illusion of depth created from flat, two-dimensional image or images’. Make your own stereogram using this online Easy Stereogram Builder!
