Creative Mitigation: A Historic Preservation Lesson Plan For Fourth Grade Students
Project Description: Mitigative measures proscribed in Memorandum of Agreements (MOA) may range from straightforward documenation reports to more creative, interpretational projects. Recently, as mitigation of adverse effects for the Clintonville 2 Communications Tower in Bourbon County, Kentucky, CRA wrote a historic preservation lesson plan that uses Auvergne, a National Register-listed Bourbon County farm, as a case study for teaching fourth grade students about Bourbon County agricultural history. The lesson plan was based, in part, on the Teaching with Historic Places program of the National Park Service and designed to conform to the Kentucky Department of Education’s standards-based lesson plan template.
Drawing upon site visits to Auvergne and the wealth of archival materials available at the University of Kentucky’s Special Collections, CRA’s architectural historians designed four focused lessons about nineteenth century agriculture in Bourbon County. The lesson plans guide students through a careful examination of primary documents and contemporary photographs of Auvergne to write a biography of the farm’s founder, learn about early settlement patterns in the Bluegrass region, draw a site plan to compare historic descriptions of the farm to current conditions, and consider the experiences of the enslaved African Americans who once lived and worked at Auvergne. Maps, census records, tax inventories, labor contracts, and historic agricultural journal articles provide insight into Auvergne’s history, while photographs of the farm’s historic buildings and landscapes allow students to see how that history survives today. Through extension activities, the lesson plans also encourage students to be good stewards of local historic resources. Once students learn to see old buildings and objects as clues about the past, they take this skill with them into their homes and communities and begin to appreciate their surroundings in new ways.
Download the lesson plan in pdf:
Bourbon County Agricultural History: A Historic Preservation Lesson Plan for Fourth Grade Students
