If Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King Jr. had a Facebook page, what would it say? Sixth-grade students at Happy Valley Middle School tackled that question as part of a class project as the children studied the “Freedom Walkers” of the civil rights movement.
As part of their English language arts curriculum, students recently studied the book Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott by Russell Freedman. Mandy Greer, a language arts teacher at HVMS, said studying the book allowed the students to not only work on their reading skills but also allowed them to learn about an important time in the nation’s history.
“We felt that this particular book gave us a chance to use cross-curricular academic skills with the students to help them also learn a valuable life lesson through history,” Greer said. “We mainly focused on the idea that without teaching history, it has a habit of repeating itself, and this particular study really opened a lot of the students’ eyes to just how bad things were in the not so distant past.”
There are two sixth-grade language arts classes at HVMS and Greer said both she and fellow teacher, Christy Thompson, presented the project to their classes. As part of the class project, students were told to choose a character from the book and create a mock Facebook profile on the character based on what they read in the book and the information discussed in class.
“Obviously, we did not do that on the internet,” Greer said, adding students used a template to create a poster showing what a Facebook profile might look like.
The project was well received by the students, Greer said, adding she and Thompson saw a lot of different emotions from the students as they studied the Montgomery bus boycott. “They read it in the history books all the time but this really brought it to life for them,” she added.
For some of the students, using something they were already familiar with helped bring the story to life. Shannon Gillman said she has a Facebook page so the project was fun for her.
“I got to see what it was like to be them and see what they would post,” she said.
Several students said making the mock Facebook profile not only made the class fun but helped them learn. “I like learning, but I’m a hands on learner,” Nyla Graham said.
Gillian Davis said she enjoyed the whole project and how her teacher incorporated different activities. “You actually had fun,” she said. “It is really fun to learn in this class.
Several of the students said their favorite part of the project was learning more about the people involved in the civil rights movement and Montgomery bus boycott.
For her project, Myra Holtsclaw chose Claudette Colvin as her character. “I liked learning about Claudette and that she was the first person to refuse to give up her seat to a white person,” Holtsclaw said.
On March 2, 1955, Colvin was the first person arrested for resisting bus segregation in Montgomery, Ala., preceding the more publicized Rosa Parks incident by nine months. Colvin was 15 years old at the time of her arrest. Because of Colvin’s age at the time of her arrest, Greer said she felt the students related better to Colvin’s story.
Several students chose Parks for their project, including Emily Lunceford. “I liked learning more about Rosa Parks,” Lunceford said. “I find her very interesting.”