The unit that asks for this
Third grade Unit 5, The People and Governments of Massachusetts, runs April to June and asks students to investigate their own community. DESE notes it takes more planning than the other units because the material is local. Fifth grade Unit 4, The Civil War and the Ongoing Fight for Civil Rights, runs the same months, and in most Massachusetts towns the evidence for it is on the street.
Most schools teaching these units for the first time have no local material built yet. That is what a Backyard History day produces: a question, a route, the sources, and a plan your teachers own.
What a day looks like
Morning
One class walks their town with a question they can’t answer from a desk. They stop at buildings, walls, markers, and maps, and work from what’s in front of them. I ask; they generate.
Teachers watch
Their teachers walk with us, not as chaperones. They carry a one-page observation sheet: what moves are being made, what questions are doing the work, where students are producing rather than receiving.
Afternoon
Teachers debrief what they saw and design the next walking investigation for their own class, mapped to the unit they’re in. They leave with it on one page, with a date on the calendar.
How I work
I don’t deliver historical content. I facilitate the investigation. Students generate the questions, read the sources, weigh perspectives that disagree, and build claims from evidence. That is the Investigating History method, done outdoors, with the town as the text.
Every day includes a scouting visit to your town before we arrive. I walk the route, find the sources, and check them with the local historical society. The route is built for your students, not borrowed from somewhere else.
I facilitate; I don’t lecture.
An example, from my own backyard
I live on sixteen wooded acres outside Stockbridge. Running through the woods is a low stone wall that ignores every property line on the map. On the state’s LiDAR layer, with the trees stripped away, it turns out to be one of hundreds, a whole network of walls from the century when these hills were cleared for sheep.
Follow that wall and you reach the tract the Beecher Stowe family owned and, a few miles on, the land where W.E.B. Du Bois grew up and where his great-great-grandfather had been enslaved. A third grader can walk it and ask what changed here and who decided. A fifth grader can walk it and ask what the Civil War looked like from this valley.
The point isn’t Stockbridge. Every town in the Commonwealth has a version of this. The point is that the sources are outside.
Listed by DESE
Backyard History is listed by the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education as a Content Learning Partner for Investigating History, Units 3.1 through 3.5 and 5.4.
Where things stand
Backyard History is new. The method is not: it’s the inquiry sequence inside Investigating History, which I’ve spent most of a career helping states and districts put into practice. I’m taking a small number of districts this school year, scouting each town myself, and being plain about what I’m learning. Spring units start in April, so the conversations that lead to a spring walk happen in January and February.
Start a conversation
If you run a district or a school teaching Investigating History, say who you are and where, and we’ll talk. If you teach it yourself, start with the free January session on the For teachers page.