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4^th Grade Lesson Designs

Day 1 - Describing and Tracking Allen B. Light

I. Lesson Objectives:

1. Given a copy of Light's sailor protection paper, students will be able to gather factual information about Allen B. Light and write a description of his life up until 1827.
2. After each student writes up a description of Light and listens to descriptions by his/her classmates, the students will begin to make oral inferences regarding:

- Why this document was so valuable to an African American
- Why Light needed the document in the first place
- What rights this document guaranteed him as a person of color in that period.

3. Given a copy of a map of the Americas, students will be able to trace the voyage of the Pilgrim from New York to Santa Barbara by the end of the class.

• Time for entire lesson: 50 minutes

II. Materials Needed

1. Reproduction of original sailor protection paper, 4^th grade paraphrased version, 4^th grade document analysis of the sailor protection paper, map of North and South. For mapping exercise, it would help to have a large map of the world for students to look at.
2. Dry erase markers, vocabulary words, papers, pencils, markers.
3. Preparation guidelines: Read the Biography of Allen Light. Then download the 4^th grade paraphrase text, the document analysis sheet, map of the Pilgrim's route and the reproduction of Light's sailor protection paper. Make copies of the first three items for each student. You may either Xerox the original Sailor Protection document onto a transparency for an overhead projector or make copies for each student. A painting of the Pilgrim is also available to download and copy onto a transparency.

III. Lesson Presentation

1. Introduction: (5 minutes) This week you will be detectives investigating the disappearance of one Allen B. Light, last seen in San Diego in 1850. Everyone who knew him died long ago. Some of his friends and business partners mentioned him briefly in their memoirs, but the two major clues we have of his life were found buried in the wall of a house in Old Town.

Your job is to find out all you can about Allen Light and figure out how he came to live in San Diego. The first piece of evidence is his sailor protection paper. Once we know more about him, we can try to figure out what he was doing in California. Here is a copy of the original document (show the reproduction). The San Diego Historical Society made a 4^th grade version of this for us to analyze.

2. Reading comprehension activity (about 20 minutes, depending on reading level of students and whether or not this is a group activity): Distribute copies of sailor protection paper and ask students to write down their answers to the following guide questions:

3. Class Discussion: (15 minutes) After everyone is done writing their descriptions, collect their document analysis sheets and ask students to verbally describe Allen Light. List the facts on the board. Then ask students to speculate about:
• Why this document was so valuable to an African American (Possible answers: it proved he was not a runaway slave; allowed him to work for pay; enabled him to travel outside his home state)
• Why Light needed the document in the first place (answers: to travel freely; to work as a sailor, to have the same rights granted to other American citizens)
• What rights this document guaranteed him as a person of color in that period (answers: the right to travel, to own property, to work as a sailor, to being sold into slavery if his ship dropped anchor in a slave-owning state)
4. Mapping exercise: (10 minutes) Tell students that records show that Light may have arrived in Santa Barbara on the Pilgrim. Give out copies of the map of North and South America. Ask them to calculate how many months it took him to get from the East Coast to California. Ask them to trace the ship's route by looking for Boston, Pernambuco, Trinidad, Falkland Islands, Cape Horn, Juan Fernandez Island and Santa Barbara. Discussion question: When Allen Light arrived in Santa Barbara, was he in Mexico or the United States? (Answer: Alta California was a territory of Mexico until 1847).

IV. Evaluation:

1. Collect individual student descriptions of Allen Light and check them against biographical information (i.e. physical description, date and place of birth, when and where the sailor protection papers were issued), or use the answer key to correct.
2. Collect student's maps to check Pilgrim's ship route.