ABSTRACT
Throughout the year, Amy Leigh draws her fourth graders’ attention to
the way ideas, attitudes, values, and beliefs have changed over time.
Near the beginning of the year, for example, the class investigates
changes in names. After talking about their own first names, students
collect information on names in their own, their parents’, and their
grandparents’ generations-which names have become more or less
common, how the length of names has changed, and how the reason
for choosing names has changed. Students work in groups to record
and analyze the data they collect, and they make presentations on their
findings to the rest of the class. Afterward, they visit a nearby cemetery
to collect information on names further back in time, and they examine
19th-century census records of Cherokee Indians and enslaved
Africans for information on naming patterns among those populations.
