Your own town
📍 Newburyport
2 chapters on a 3D map of Newburyport, about 35 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.
The Big River · Joppa · The Walking Lighthouse · An Island of Sand
Standards: 3.T1.1 · 3.T2.1
The Bresnahan School · The Chain Bridge · Maudslay · March’s Hill
Standards: 3.T1.1 · RI.3.7
Word for word what students read, with the sources we checked them against.
every day
This is the Merrimack River. It starts far away in New Hampshire, where two rivers meet. From there it runs south into Massachusetts. Then it turns and heads for the sea. It is more than one hundred miles long! Right here, it flows past downtown Newburyport. Look north, across the water. That is the town of Salisbury. Now look east. Not far from here, the river meets the Atlantic Ocean.
Sources: en.wikipedia.org · merrimack.org · fws.gov
built 2013–2014
This is the Bresnahan School, at 333 High Street. Kids from pre-K to grade 3 learn here. Workers built it in 2013 and 2014. An older school stood on this same land. Now look at the map. The Merrimack River is north of here. Downtown is to the east. High Street runs across the city, from the northwest to the southeast. Where is your street?
Sources: bresnahan.newburyport.k12.ma.us · cityofnewburyport.com · massschoolbuildings.org · openstreetmap.org
three centuries
For hundreds of years, the mudflats off this shore fed the people of Joppa. For a long time, the water got too dirty to dig. Now clammers are back. Clammers dug at low tide and sold clams by the bushel, which is a big basket. They argued about greenheads, the biting flies. Joppa is an old fishing neighborhood at the edge of the city.
Sources: bostonglobe.com · brickandtree.wordpress.com · historynewburyport.com · historicnewengland.org · en.wikipedia.org