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How The Other Half Lived: A Lesson on Life in the City 1Y3
Kim Edmondson
The War for Reform Y3 11/17/06
This lesson is a preliminary lesson on the origins of the Progressive Era. It deals with how Americans lived and worked in the crowded conditions of the nation's largest cities during the period from about 1890 to World War I. Emphasis is placed on how problems in the poor sections of the cities would eventually lead to demands for social reform.
Overhead projector
Copies of How the Other Half Lives by Jacob Riis - The hypertext version may be found at http://www.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/riis/title.html
Copies of Reading Guide - How the Other Half Lives and Reading Guide Answer Key (See linked files)
90 minutes
1Y3
What types of problems did residents of the rapidly growing cities face at the beginning of the 20th Century?
5 minutes. Paragraph writing: What are the advantages to living in a large city?
20 minutes. Do a roundtable activity to have students discuss the problems that are part of city living. Divide class into groups of 3-5 students. Give each group one sheet of paper. Write the topic "Problems with Living in a Large City" on the board or overhead projector. In each group, the first student writes something s/he knows about the topic and passes it to the next student. That student writes something different about the topic and so on. After five or ten minutes, one student from each group reads what is on each group's list. Compile a class list from student responses. In writing on the topic students should think about such things as housing, transportation, safety, food/water, and sanitation.
Note: Extra teacher help/instruction may be needed for students with lower reading levels. 30 minutes. Students should have access to a copy of Jacob Riis' How the Other Half Lives and the attached Reading Guide. The hypertext version may be found at http://www.yale.edu/amstud/inforev/riis/title.html . Students should read the first two chapters, completing the reading guide, noting in particular the descriptions of the tenement apartments themselves, how many people were living there, and to what problems these conditions contributed. Discuss the readings as a class. 20 minutes. Working in groups, the students should design a floor plan of an apartment building that would comfortably house 6-8 families. Each apartment should have a living area, kitchen, bath and two bedrooms. The living areas and bedrooms should have at least one window each and all apartments should open into a common hallway that also has 1-2 windows and access to the outside of the building. Students should present their designs, describing how their building does away with problems such as ventilation, lighting, sewage, overcrowding, etc. |
15 minutes. Review the Essential Question and the roundtable discussion and review some of the problems of city life and how the rapid growth of the city contributed to these problems.
Compare/Contrast activity. Students should create a T - chart with the following headings: City Life Today and City Life in the Early 1900s. Under each heading they should list advantages and disadvantages of living in the city during each time period. Then the students should answer the question, "How do you think people managed to change the living conditions in the cities from the early 1900s to today?"
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How the Other Half Lives Reading Guide_1Y3 Edmonds
How the Other Half Lives Reading Guide Answer Key