For an example of a walking tour brochure, see A Walking Tour of Hallowell and Augusta, Maine . Create a Martha Ballard timeline . Fill in the blanks with personal, local, and world events, or create an entirely separate parallel timeline of local dates. Display the timelines for reference. As other dates are encountered through the study of history during the year, affix them to the timelines.
Students keep a diary of their activities for one week.
At the end of the week, as a class, they discuss the kinds and amounts of information that they wrote down, and how their diaries compare with Martha Ballard's. Then each student, using her or his own diary, pretends to be a historian who discovers the document in the year 2500. He or she writes a historical analysis based on the evidence. At the conclusion of the activity, the class discusses what diaries as historical documents may and may not tell us. These are only a few suggestions of the many possible activities that you could plan.