Your own town
📍 Gloucester
7 chapters on a 3D map of Gloucester, about 120 minutes in all. Students explore it with Scout, find a true story at each place, then use what they learned.
Chapter 1 plays in your browser on a computer.
Wanaskwiwam · The Shell Piles · Masconomet
Standards: 3.T1.2 · 3.T2.3d · 3.T1.1
The Fish Stages · The Pilgrims Come to Cape Ann · The Cut · The River Light · The Man Who Painted the Light
Standards: 3.T1.2 · 3.T5.5a · 3.T5.3 · 3.T1.1
A Town Is Born · Schooner Adventure
Standards: 3.T1.2 · 3.T5.4 · 3.T5.5a · 3.T5.5b · 3.T5.5c
New Neighbors Arrive · Saint Peter's Fiesta · The Greasy Pole
Standards: 3.T1.2 · 3.T1.1
The Painters’ Village · The Cape Ann Museum · Homer’s Summer · The Steam Shovel Lady
Standards: 3.T5.3 · 3.T1.1 · RI.3.7
Howard Blackburn’s Hands · The Fisherman on the Box · The Inventor's Castle
Standards: RI.3.1 · RI.3.3 · 3.T1.1
The Sea Serpent · The Talking Rocks · Dogtown · The Inventor's Castle
Standards: 3.T1.1 · RI.3.1
Word for word what students read, with the sources we checked them against.
thousands of years
Dig into the dunes along these beaches and you find shells. There are heaps of them! People ate clams, oysters and mussels here for thousands of years and left the shells behind. Scientists who dig up the past call these piles middens. That is a fancy word for the world’s oldest trash pile.
Sources: capeannhistory.org · capeannhistory.org
1623
Fourteen men from England landed right here in 1623. That was before Salem or Boston even existed. They came from a town called Dorchester. They built wooden platforms called stages. A stage was a flat deck for cutting open cod and drying it in the sun. That was the whole plan: catch fish, dry fish, send fish home. The fishing lost money. The rocky land was bad for farming, too. In 1626 most of them moved down the coast to Salem. Their big house was taken apart and moved there too! But other people came back to fish here. Fishing has kept going for four hundred years.
Sources: enduringgloucester.com · en.wikipedia.org · encyclopedia.com · en.wikipedia.org · en.wikipedia.org
1642
In 1623, fishermen from England built the first settlement on Cape Ann. In 1642, the leaders of Massachusetts made Gloucester a town. They named it after a city in England. A church leader named Richard Blynman brought more settlers from Plymouth Colony. The town built its first meetinghouse on the Town Green. A meetinghouse was a place where the whole town gathered. The Green was near today’s Grant Circle. In 1698 the town started its first public school. Thomas Riggs was the teacher. In 1710, a house was built on the Green for the church leader, John White. That house is still standing! In 1873, the town became the City of Gloucester.
Sources: capeannmuseum.org · gloucester-ma.gov · en.wikipedia.org · cape-ann.com · timeline.sawyerfreelibrary.org · timeline.sawyerfreelibrary.org · capeannmuseum.org · timeline.sawyerfreelibrary.org · capeannmuseum.org · coastalbyway.org