Mark Morris Tour Groups  Visit the 50's!  WebQuest by Patti Tjomsland, July 2000

Introduction

Travel back in time to the 1950's. Teenagers are forming a new culture, one that will influence music, cars, and styles for years to come. Instead of "Intruder on Campus" drills, students are crawling under their desks to prepare for a nuclear explosion. Politicians are warning citizens of the "red threat" and households are getting their first televison sets.

Task

You have been assigned to Tour Groups of three students. Together you will travel back to the 1950's . Once there each of you will investigate a different part of the culture of the time. All of you will work together to create a timeline and an oral presentation. Each of you will:

• write a 4-5 page paper, with a bibliography (check next area for specifics for paper.)
• make a 4 minute presentation to the class for a total of 12 minutes for your group.
• have some type of visual or concrete item(s) to accompany your report. Each individual will create a visual, but the must all tie together. You will need to plan this as a group.
• fill out an evaluation on the other members of your group

• One page on each of your individual topics. Each page will describe what this issue was like in the 1950's and explain it's influence on the issues/culture of today.
• One page outlining what you would like and/or not like about being a teenager in the 1950's. Be Specific.
• One page that is a time-line of the 50's. Work as a group. Your timeline cannot repeat any of the events on the timeline of any other member in your group.
• You must have a bibliography and title page.
• Use the font "Comic Sans" for your font. Use 12pt. Not bigger. Run spell check before you turn in the paper.

1. Each person in the Tour Group picks three topics from the following chart. You cannot have the same topic as anyone else in the group. Fill in the attached chart. (I am going to make a chart for names of group members and what topics they have. Each member of the group will have to fill this out. It will have a place for kids to narrow their topics.)

Topics to choose from:

Music of the 1950's	Fiction of the 1950's	Beat Poets of the 1950's	Joe McCarthy and MCarthyism
The Cold War	Black Athletes of the 1950's	Television comes to the '50's	Movies of the 1950's
Women in the Workplace	Inventions to make life easier	Korean War	The Space Race
Civil Rights in the 1950's	Nuclear testing and development	Changes in transportation	Have an idea? SEE ME FIRST!

Make a new page here

The list of topics is pretty general. In order to focus your research to something you can write about on one page, you need to NARROW the topic. It is difficult to do this if you don't know much about your topic to begin with. You need to look at some of the sources for your topic and think about how to narrow it. When you have decided how to narrow your topic you need to get your idea approved by the teacher or media specialist.

2. Narrow each of your three topics to something you can explain in one page. Use the following resources to learn about your topic and make some intelligent choices.

Print Resources:

The White Encyclopedia of the 20th Century

Encyclopedia of World Biography

The Decades: 50's

Library Book

Library Book

Library Book

Internet Resources

Literature of the 1950's
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~afilreis/50s/home.html

The Fifties Web
http://www.fiftiesweb.com/fifties.htm

Cold War Hot Links
http://www.stmartin.edu/~dprice/cold.war.html

Main Events of the Eisenhower Presidency
http://history.cc.ukans.edu/heritage/abilene/ikeeven.html

Senator Joe McCarthy
http://webcorp.com/test/whywebcorp.htm

Human Radiation Experiments
http://tis.eh.doe.gov/ohre/

Intelligence and Counter Intelligence
How did spying play a role in the 50's?
http://www.kimsoft.com:80/kim-spy.htm

The Beat Generation
http://www.charm.net/~brooklyn/Topics/BeatGen.html

1950's timeline
http://www.mediahistory.com/time/1950s.html

Baseball and Jackie Robinson  American Memory
http://www.mediahistory.com/time/1950s.html

Rewind the Fifties

http://www.loti.com/page2.html

The Day the Earth Stood Still
http://www.afionline.org/wise/films/day_the_earth_stood_still/dtess.html

Pictures from the 50's

http://dennyjackson.homepage.com/fifties.html
 
 

Research Paper Help

How to write a bibliographic entry for Internet Resources. Classroom Connect's How to Cite: http://connectedteacher.classroom.com/newsletter/citeintres.asp
 
 

Evaluation

This project is worth 125 points. 100 of the points are from the work you do individually and 25 points are for how well your group works together. Look at the following rubric to find out where the points are distributed.

Content of Topic One			15 Points
Content of Topic Two			15 Points
Content of Topic Three			15 Points
Content of Timeline			5 Points
Organization and Presentation			5 Points
Choice of Visual: includes how it blends with group choices, appropriateness of choice, originality			5 Points
Presentation of Visual: includes neatness and visual appeal			5 Points
Content of Why or Why not you would like to live in the 1950's			10 Points
Mechanics of Paper: Spelling, neatness, sentence structure, proofreading, vocabulary			10 Points
Bibliography: Includes format, and if you actually used 4 different sources. One of which must be print.			10 Points