Cleaning Cotton

We’ve had a crazy winter here in Minnesota, and have so far missed five days due to cold, not snow.  It’s made getting back in the rhythm of school a bit challenging since our winter break, and I’ve found that I’m feeling like I’m constantly behind compared to where I was in my curriculum last year. I’m also  disappointed that I haven’t been as inspired to blog, since I don’t feel like I’ve tried anything worth blogging about. But this week I did do an activity I discovered last year, and maybe some of you will think it’s worth doing.

 In addition to reading and writing, I also teach social studies, and last year I got to attend some in-service training on using inquiry in the classroom. The two professors who taught the class were great, and gave me lots to think about in terms of how I could make social studies more inquiry-based, instead of just reading out of the text book the whole time.  I’ve never done the book exclusively, but I started to think about how I could incorporate more hands-on activities into our units. Our curriculum focus is the states and regions of the United States, and last year at this time, we had begun to study the South. I was digging around on the internet for something more interactive we could do to learn more about slavery, and I found this website called Cotton Classroom (http://cottonclassroom.com/) You can order a box of uncleaned cotton and they also provide a lesson plan to use. I decided to give it a try, and shortly afterward, received a box packed with cotton.

As a northerner, I haven’t seen a field of cotton, let alone worked with it in any form other than cotton balls from Target, so I was pretty interested. It comes with tons of seeds in it, and also bits of leaves and stems. I had the students create a t-chart labeled “I notice/I wonder”, gave them each a pile of cotton, and they got to work. I loved hearing their conversations as they worked to get the seeds out, and I had to remind them to put those good ideas down in writing so they wouldn’t forget them! It’s one of the best activities I do in terms of engaging the students, because everyone is busy trying to get those seeds out.  After a while, someone usually says, “Did the slaves have to clean the cotton like this?” It leads to some realizations about the difficulty of the work slaves did, and is a great segue into discussion of the cotton gin and how technology changed cotton farming.

Cotton Classroom also includes Solomon Northup’s primary document about slaves picking cotton, and it’s a great resource to help students realize how difficult and often violent the life of a slave was. Once the students have spent some time trying to clean that cotton, they are even more receptive to Northup’s descriptions of the work expectations masters had of slaves. There is no good way to recreate the slave experience, and I’m not sure I’d even want to try, but this small activity has been a great way for students to begin thinking about slavery and technology. I highly recommend it!