Remembering the War of 1812

This week and every week as our team here at Maggie’s Earth Adventures put our heads together to consider topics for the week’s blog, the rush of ideas were tremendous.  And it made me pause and consider once again the responsibility we have as teachers to cover so much material, recognizing that there is so much that gets left out. I guess that’s what keeps me teaching until everything is taught! This week we pared down our ideas to focus on the 200^th anniversary year of the War of 1812. And in the wake of the contemporary heroes we paid tribute to this September 11^th, we felt our students might also appreciate learning about an everyday vintage hero from two centuries ago.  And here the idea to profile Kitty Knight was born.  She may be unknown, but her bravery is legendary and her story represents what so many people did during that time.    Inspired to learn more?  We hope you will delve deeper into her story and look at sites such as http://www.kittyknight.com/pages/about.htm. In fact, an interesting activity is to ask your students to create travel brochures or web pages based on this information, providing more detail on the Georgetown of the day.