Recently we started discussing the topic of Manifest Destiny, the Oregon Trail, and the Santa Fe Trail. There's a video game that if you were raised in the 80's and 90's you might have played to see if you survived or not. Originally I was going to do the game on the iPads with my students, but they were having technical issues at the time. So here's what I did in its place.
1) GOOGLE IT/Find It - There's lots of things available online, however some of which you have to pay for. So be careful. I found a great sheet a teacher made of a general store and the costs. I also found the blog for how they were doing it. I took the budgets they created to go with their general store list. Students then were randomly assigned a profession and had to budget their income with supplies for the trip to try and make sure they used most of their budget on supplies, but then also have a little extra in case of a "rainy day" (budgeting = life skill).
2) Adapt It - I also created Fate Cards in tables in word Fate Cards for things that could happen to along the trail (tornado, snake bites, river crossings, etc.) and costs to them (having a Native American cure the rattle snake bite was $5.00 or they could roll the dice to see if their child survived the bite).
3) Adjust - we then began our adventure. My first class of the day I just had them adding to their totals; My second class of the day we had a list of the number of fates and they wrote down what they were going to do and then added the costs as well. I found that adjusting it to include the list made them a little more accountable in their final numbers.
They then did their math (cross-curricular development?) and then we talked about minimum totals that meant their either survived or died along the journey.
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