20 enchanting art projects and other creative activities that illuminate and enrich your study of the Middle Ages.

GRADES 5–8: This 64-page social studies workbook allows students to build their knowledge of important concepts by using hands-on presentations and activities to better understand the integration of history and language arts. INCLUDES: Lessons that highlight specific concepts in language arts and geography, each lesson gives students guidelines and step-by-step instructions. Projects cover topics from ancient civilizations and the Middle Ages to the Civil War, the Renaissance, and much more. BENEFITS: To help students strengthen their research skills by using print and online sources, this resource book allows students to plan, research, and implement hands-on projects for which they will then demonstrate their knowledge by producing written, graphic, or oral presentations. WHY MARK TWAIN MEDIA: Mark Twain Media Publishing Company specializes in providing captivating, supplemental books and decorative resources to complement middle- and upper-grade classrooms. Designed by leading educators, the product line covers a range of subjects including mathematics, sciences, language arts, social studies, history, government, fine arts, and character.

In an increasingly electronic society, these exercises are designed to help school and collegiate educators use historical devices of mathematics to balance the digital side of mathematics.

A lavishly illustrated study of the natural and cultural history of the Vermont landscape. In this book Jan Albers examines the history—natural, environmental, social, and ultimately human—of one of America's most cherished landscapes: Vermont. Albers shows how Vermont has come to stand for the ideal of unspoiled rural community, examining both the basis of the state's pastoral image and the equally real toll taken by the pressure of human hands on the land. She begins with the relatively light touch of Vermont's Native Americans, then shows how European settlers—armed with a conviction that their claim to the land was "a God-given right"—shaped the landscape both to meet economic needs and to satisfy philosophical beliefs. The often turbulent result: a conflict between practical requirements and romantic ideals that has persisted to this day. Making lively use of contemporary accounts, advertisements, maps, landscape paintings, and vintage photographs, Albers delves into the stories and personalities behind the development of a succession of Vermont landscapes. She observes the growth of communities from tiny settlements to picturesque villages to bustling cities; traces the development of agriculture, forestry, mining, industry, and the influence of burgeoning technology; and proceeds to the growth of environmental consciousness, aided by both private initiative and governmental regulation. She reveals how as community strengthens, so does responsible stewardship of the land. Albers shows that like any landscape, the Vermont landscape reflects the human decisions that have been made about it—and that the more a community understands about how such decisions have been made, the better will be its future decisions.

Make history fun and interactive to motivate your social studies students. This book includes game-formatted activities for major historical topics. While the goal of these activities is to create excitement and to spark interest in further study, they are also standards based and include grading rubrics and ideas for assessment. Encouraging teamwork, creativity, intelligent reflection, and decision making, the games of Hands-on History Activities will help you take an active approach to teaching while inspiring your students to make their own explorations of history. This resource is aligned to the interdisciplinary themes from the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. 176pp.

Hands on Media History explores the whole range of hands on media history techniques for the first time, offering both practical guides and general perspectives. It covers both analogue and digital media; film, television, video, gaming, photography and recorded sound. Understanding media means understanding the technologies involved. The hands on history approach can open our minds to new perceptions of how media technologies work and how we work with them. Essays in this collection explore the difficult questions of reconstruction and historical memory, and the issues of equipment degradation and loss. Hands on Media History is concerned with both the professional and the amateur, the producers and the users, providing a new perspective on one of the modern era’s most urgent questions: what is the relationship between people and the technologies they use every day? Engaging and enlightening, this collection is a key reference for students and scholars of media studies, digital humanities, and for those interested in models of museum and research practice.

Succinct, with a brace of original documents following each chapter, Christopher J. Olsen's The American Civil War is the ideal introduction to American history's most famous, and infamous, chapter. Covering events from 1850 and the mounting political pressures to split the Union into opposing sections, through the four years of bloodshed and waning Confederate fortunes, to Lincoln's assassination and the advent of Reconstruction, The American Civil War covers the entire sectional conflict and at every juncture emphasizes the decisions and circumstances, large and small, that determined the course of events.