The Oakland Museum Internet site dealing with the California Gold Rush originated with a 1999 sesquicentennial celebration and exhibit on the subject of events of 1849 and afterward in California. Two out of eleven fourth-grade lesson plans are available online, dealing with (1) traveling west by sea and the influence of the Gold Rush on California's industrial and cultural growth, and (2) everyday life of miners, mining's impact on the environment, and the role of technology.
The lesson plans provide objectives, suggested review questions, projects, and evaluation criteria and suggest the amount of time to devote to specific segments, such as keeping a daily "Argonaut journal," as if the students were sailing on a ship to California. Plans are also keyed to online/multimedia images, such as paintings and prints of Gold Rush-era landscapes of the Bay Area; classroom computers are assumed. A real benefit of the online plans is that they present excerpts from the writings of Gold Rush-era commentators, both everyday people and more famous observers, like Frederick Douglass. The online plans appear to be a marketing tool for ordering more multimedia packages ($120 for four).
The second lesson plan was accessed at a Discovery Channel Internet site containing dozens of lesson plans. The Klondike Fever lesson plan deals in a general way with gold fever and is not as self-contained as the Oakland plans. Its list of materials calls for an encyclopedia and access to "other print and electronic sources about aspects of gold," plus an overhead transparency projector. It is not keyed to one grade but has grade-specific suggestions for grades 6-8--unfortunate since the bibliography consists of exactly one text. The one Internet link in the plan--to Klondike-era photographs--yielded an error message, but sound cues of such vocabulary words as permafrost did function properly. The site is not rich in art or original documents, as the Oakland pl...