Kansas Day on January 29th provides a prime opportunity for teachers to creatively educate students on statehood history across various subjects. Lessons can bring the frontier struggle to join the Union alive through immersive activities. This guide outlines ideas spanning creative writing, geography, research and more utilizing the historical holiday tie-in. These dynamic plans engage various learning styles from hands-on to discussion-based.
English & Creative Writing
Literacy offers varied avenues to examine how early traveller accounts, fiery abolitionist appeals, and other writing encapsulate Kansas’ enduring free state spirit.
Write a Wagon Train Travelogue Entry
After discussing the challenges pioneers overcame settling Kansas territory, students will pen 3 journal entries from a fictional traveller’s viewpoint. Describe preparations for leaving Independence before conveying obstacles faced during the long prairie journey toward Fort Riley. What details can convey adversity while highlighting Kansas’ sweeping beauty?
Craft an Anti-Slavery Speech
Paying homage to abolitionists who fought slavery, have students compose a 2-3 minute speech as if standing with reverend John Brown rallying citizens to join the cause. How can powerful rhetoric, imagery, and urgency push citizens to act against injustice?
Create Advertisements to Lure Settlers
Kansas passed temperance laws banning liquor early on alongside suffrage and schooling rights to attract moral residents westward. Charge students with designing broadsheet-styled pioneer ads for these virtues to appeal to families debating the long journey. Apply persuasive language and graphics.
Geography & Environment
The landscape shaped how early Native tribes nurtured the land before vast western settlements adapted prairies into farmland. These activities examine regional physical changes alongside modern stewardship ideals conservationists modelled on initial land ethics.
Create Kansas Topography Maps
Using relief maps, have students highlight key geographic variances that influenced tribal land utilization from grassy plains for hunting ranges near the Arkansas River to forests providing timber along the Missouri River region up east.
Examine How Settlers Cultivated The Plains
Show images demonstrating the drastic landscape changes settlers imposed transforming diverse prairie grasses supporting plains for farmland monocultures of crops like wheat. Discuss the environmental impacts of such changes and how farming practices strive to rectify this today.
Research Modern Conservation Innovations
From Kansas farmer Frank Meyer selectively breeding hardy wheat strains that fed Russia famine relief efforts to botanist Aldo Leopold pioneering sustainable ‘land ethics’, Kansans spearheaded conservation. Have students present on modern agricultural activists inspired by such a vision.
Arts & Research Projects
Artistic expression alongside individual exploration allows students to connect creatively with events, cultures and identities throughout Kansas’s history.
Illustrate Key Kansas Suffrage Figures
Students will select early female activists who shaped progressivism around equality from Clarina Nichols who launched Kansas’ first women’s rights newspaper to Martha Hughes Cannon who defied the odds becoming America’s first female state senator elected in Utah after getting medical training at Kansas State. Have students depict these trailblazers through drawings showcasing stirring moments from their fight alongside biographical captions.
Profile an Indigenous Tribe
Exploring often overlooked early Native inhabitants like the Kansa tribe Kansas was named for, Osage communities, and roaming Pawnee nations introduces students to traditional lifestyles before expansionism. Have students research and then present key elements of life spanning food cultivation, housing, societal structure and more regarding a single tribe.
Recreate Symbols of Frontier Survival
Understanding tools hometown ancestors utilized provides perspective on early settler perseverance that today’s conveniences obscure. Have students select an artefact vital for travel or sustaining frontier settlements from spinning wheels to churning butter to candle molds. Craft replica items using basic materials explaining practical application.
Kansas Day Lesson Plan Concepts
| Subject | Activity | Skills Utilized |
|---|---|---|
| English | Wagon train journal entries | Creative writing, perspective taking |
| Abolitionist speech | Persuasive writing and speaking | |
| Promote settlement virtues | Advertising, graphic design | |
| Geography | Kansas relief maps | Research, data visualization |
| Settler environmental impact | Critical thinking, stewardship | |
| Conservation innovations | Research, public speaking | |
| Arts | Suffrage figure illustrations | Biography research, art |
| Native tribal profiles | Research, writing | |
| Pioneer artifact replicas | History, design |
Conclusion
The annual commemoration of Kansas’s progression from the bloody fight for statehood toward becoming the Free State offers abundant opportunities to educate students on representations, values and traditions that granted this distinctive identity. Through writing, discussion, research and design-focused lesson plans, teachers can move beyond dates to have students connect more meaningfully across various subjects with the enduring events and figures who refuse to be deterred from honing the resolute, community-driven spirit central to Jayhawk identity from past through the present day. With adaptable blueprints covering pioneers, agriculture and activism, the milestone provides engaging anchor points that inspire students by demonstrating the heights Kansans reached when coming together for just causes greater than themselves.
