Lodging Houses

Certain "home" themes are a good fit for NYC history. The lodging houses, in particular, were in abundance in the late 1800's. The Children's Aid Society constructed many and, in fact, the great architect Calvert Vaux was hired to design one built on 6th Street, between B and C. Altagracia's 3rd graders did a great project on that building two years ago, concentrating a good deal on its design and historical landmark status. That old lodging house and others are certainly worth revisiting for a project on what life was like living in them. A great video source is the Disney movie "Newsies." Great dancing, great songs-it's a cult favorite with many fan sites. Many of those sites have original stories telling parallel tales of the characters in the movie. The picture above comes from an excellent digital component of the NYPL. http://digital.nypl.org/mmpco/browse.cfm. It's a little hard to browse there-use the drop down menu
Here's a newsie slide show (this one works manually-you have to click the arrow buttons) that was directed at kids narrating and recording their reactions to the story. Here's one where the attempt was to experiment with kids' faces with the characters as well as "karaoke" type read alouds. Wow-there's one face that's really scary! Looking back on these (more than 2 years old) I see where I wasn't focused so much on a specific literacy link, but more on the fun aspects for kids and technology (and there ain't nothing wrong with that!)