Smith School Intermediate Montessori Class
Helena, Montana

The Corps of Discovery: The Rivers, the Streams, and Their names

This page is devoted to an ongoing program and we hope that some other schools along the Lewis and Clark trail may choose to join us in a similar endeavor. We might then exchange the results of our experiences to evaluate the value of such a classroom undertaking.

We are an Intermediate public Montessori class of fourth and fifth graders in Helena, MT. We are engaged in a project to correlate the names that Lewis and Clark assigned to streams that enter the Missouri River in the vicinity of Helena, MT with the names that are currently used.

We propose to work the region that the expedition traversed in a thirteen day period from July 15,1805 through July 27, 1805.

The plan is:

• Review the general history of the expedition as a class.
• Become acquainted with the members of the party, how they traveled and what they saw and did.
• Assign a team of 2 or 3 students to each of the 13 days involved.
• A given team will read all of the journal entries and footnotes -- as found in Moulton, The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition -- for their assigned day.
• Each team, having prepared a digest of any information recorded for that day, will share it with the other teams.
• The class will review the assembled information to see if any desired correlations can be made with streams shown on present day maps of the region.
• In addition, they will have an opportunity to share other items that they find of interest.
• As a class, they will then learn how to add their collective information to this web site, and you will find it in Student Reports.

Clearly, this exercise provides many opportunities for discussions beyond the immediate scope of naming streams. The students will learn of geography, geology, plants, animals, and birds as they follow the journal entries. They will have to use their reasoning skills to create significance from fragments of information retrieved from different sources.

This Web page will be, forever, a work in progress. Let us start with the following organization:

Expedition Links

Sites are designed to give reader a basic knowledge of the expedition itself, its main characters, and geographical information.

Mapping Links

Some maps increase the general knowledge of the expedition. Others are meant to be used in recreating the original names of the streams and learning the current names of the streams.

Student Reports

Individual students share their information and their results.

Process

This lesson began with a brief review, as presented by Dr. Graeme Baker and Mr. Rob Freistadt, of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, from its planning stages through the expedition's return to St. Louis.

Students were subsequently separated into small, heterogeneous groups based on grade level; there were, incidentally, no groups containing mixed genders. Groups chose 2 to 3 consecutive days of the expedition (between the Great Falls and Three Forks, Montana) that they would study in preparation for making an internet web page specifically dealing with the names (then and now) of the Missouri River's tributaries. Students spent almost two weeks studying, taking notes and discussing materials about their assigned days. They then traveled to the school district's technical center, where they constructed their web pages, with the instructional assistance of Ms. Sandi Smith, the School District's Educational Technology Specialist.

This project utilized a variety of skills in a problem solving activity. Students:

• Cooperated in small fact-finding groups, including dependence on one another, conflict resolution and membership;
• Deduced information from five different accounts of the expedition;
• Constructed written summaries of the journals they read;
• Reviewed latitude and longitude, and learned the use of chronographs and sextants;
• Applied written information from the journals to maps;
• Discovered the inevitable change of river courses over the years;
• Identified Missouri River tributaries in their locale;
• Designed charts and tables showing the relationships of information;
• Practiced the development of an internet site, complete with links;
• Empathized with the scope and difficulty that expedition members had in identifying everything they saw in what was a completely foreign land.

Materials Used

The materials the students used included Moulton's accounts of five expedition members' journals; those of Lewis, Clark, Whitehouse, Gass, and Ordway; as well as:

• Montana Atlas and Gazetteer, copyright 1994, DeLorme Mapping
• National Geographic Guide to the Lewis & Clark Trail, by Thomas Schmidt, copyright 1998, National Geographic Society
• The Journals of the Expedition Under the Command of Capts. Lewis and Clark..., edited by Nicholas Biddle, copyright 1962, The George Macy Companies, Inc.
• Along the Trail with Lewis & Clark, by Barbara Fifer and Vicky Soderberg, maps by Joseph Mussulman, copyright 1998, Montana Magazine
• Undaunted Courage, by Stephen Ambrose, copyright 1996, Ambrose-Tubbs, Inc. (First Touchstone Edition, 1997)

Additional resources are found in the links within the Web site. Students individually checked out a number of trade books from the library.

Evaluation

(as viewed by Mr. Rob Freistadt, student teacher)

This was a superb learning project for these fourth and fifth graders. It integrated many of the subjects in which these students participate:

• geography, reviewing latitude and longitude, and an awareness of their locale; history, studying the expedition itself, as well as the use of the chronograph and sextant to find one's position on the earth during historic times;
• language arts, learning to summarize succinctly and communicate with each other in preparing a web page;
• computer skill, designing a web page, exploring the internet for information;
• math, following the course of the river using degrees to show direction and developing graphs to show information in a visual way;
• science, discovering the source of discovery and names of some of the plant and animal species located in their immediate vicinity;
• library skills, searching for additional sources of information.

All of our students were extremely engaged in this activity, with those of different abilities being involved in various ways. Information gathered was not always easily obtained, as expedition members recorded information differently, sometimes contradicting each other. Due to the separation of the expedition in our area, students had to work out frequent inconsistencies which you may occasionally note in the information they compiled. Therefore, student findings may not be any more conclusive than the many publications produced over the past two centuries regarding the expedition's activities in this area. As further study occurs, it may be appropriate to make additions to student findings, and we would welcome any revelations that might contribute to a more complete understanding of this important part of our history.

This class would like to extend gratitude to Graeme Baker, Ph.D.; the Montana Science Institute, Gil and Marilyn Alexander; Helena School District, Sandi Smith, HSD Educational Technology Specialist; and, Mr. Rob Freistadt for their assistance in making this activity the successful learning experience it was.

Many thanks are extended to the members of Mrs. Joyce Nachtsheim's Intermediate Montessori Class for being such great students, and for their hard work in all that they do; they are truly one of the best classes! Should you want to continue with Lewis and Clark's Rivers and Streams click here to return to the beginning of this page.

We wish to thank the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory and the Montana Science Institute for their support of this project.

This document's URL is: © 2001 Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory Date of Last Update: 2/25/2002 Email Webmaster Tel. 503.275.9500