During one of the first tours of the New Hampshire Historical Society that Elizabeth Dubrulle led for a fourth-grade class, she asked the students who the colonists had fought during the American Revolution.
“The Greeks!” a boy confidently answered.
Dubrulle, the society’s newly-hired director of education and public programs, knew she had her work cut out for herself. For years, a focus on high-stakes reading and math testing in elementary school had diminished the time schools devoted to other subjects, including social studies — and it was showing.
“You could see the civics crisis developing before our eyes,” Dubrulle recalled of the period when she started in 2015.
Across the state, there had been much discussion about that crisis but little action. The Historical Society ultimately decided it would spearhead a solution itself, president Bill Dunlap said.
In 2017, the organization launched the Democracy Project, a $1.2 million teacher training, curriculum and advocacy initiative devoted to reinvigorating upper elementary social studies education across the state.
Eight years later, as school districts gear up for the 250th anniversary of the Revolution, that resurgence spurred by the project will take center stage in classrooms across the state. The New Hampshire-focused open-source, 18-unit curriculum that the Historical Society developed, Moose on the Loose, has become the envy of states across the country.
“Nobody else in the country is doing what we’re doing with elementary social studies,” Dubrulle said. “This is really unique – the path we’re blazing here.”
What makes “the Moose,” as the curriculum is affectionately known, unusual is not just the free, high-quality state-centric content, which spans from the ice age to the present day. The curriculum also adopts a philosophy that social studies “is the glue that holds everything together,” Dubrulle said.
The lessons are designed to incorporate reading skills in particular and include vocabulary words and common core language arts standards. Many lessons also involve math and science extensions, too. One activity on the causes of the Revolution, for example, involves examining the tax rates imposed by the British for various household items.
‘The Moose’ in action
In a stately Historical Society room adorned with framed portraits of some of New Hampshire’s famous figures, about 30 teachers from across the state gathered last week for a refresher course on the Revolution and a demonstration of all the ways they could use the curriculum.
Stacy Stanley and Paula Honeywell, fifth-grade teachers at Weare Middle School, have both used “the Moose” previously, but they said they came away from the two-day workshop with a host of new ideas and knowledge for the big year.
Stanley said her students would enjoy an activity on British system of tax levies, in which the teacher hands students 10 pennies and then arbitrarily taxes them throughout the day.
“I think a lot of kids don’t realize how unfair something was until it happens to them,” she said.
Honeywell, a self-described Revolutionary War buff, said she was blown away by learning about Molly Stark, the wife of General John Stark.
“I never knew of a woman going into war before” during the Revolutionary era, she said.
In Weare, a town steeped in Revolutionary history, the teachers said “the Moose” was another way to bring the historical period to life for their students.
Expanding ‘the Moose’
In its eight years, the Moose has expanded to roughly 125 schools and 700 teachers. Last year, 40,000 unique users accessed the curriculum’s website. Now, the Historical Society is turning to broader growth goals.
First, the organization is raising more money to develop new curricula for kindergarten through second graders and seventh and eighth graders. The current units are geared toward students in the upper elementary grades.
Second, the organization is pushing a more formal integration with language arts curricula. Historically, schools have used sample texts in language arts periods that are often boring and disconnected from what students are learning.
Last year, Dubrulle and her team worked with the Manchester School District through a yearlong grant to change that and align the district’s literacy program with “the Moose.”
Rather than reading a sample passage about ancient China, for example, the students read about historical people, places and events closer to home, such as the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company, the Concord Coach or John Stark.
“It was much more relatable to kids; it wasn’t so abstract,” Dubrulle said.
The approach is part of a pedagogical shift in literacy education that emphasizes phonics and content knowledge and recognizes that students are going to be able to decipher words more easily when reading about topics they know or are learning about.
This year, the Historical Society will reach out to every school in the state that uses Amplify, the reading program used in Manchester, to encourage them to adopt the same approach.
The change could improve reading comprehension and be transformative for social studies education, because students in these grades typically devote up to 90 minutes per day to language arts, according to Dubrulle.
“It’s going to exponentially expand how much a lot of schools are using ‘the Moose,'” she predicted.