Middle School: Grade 7 English

English 7

World’s Fair Innovation/Innovator Project

Essential question: How do humans demonstrate creative thinking, construct knowledge, and develop

innovative, ethical solutions?

Directions

Your project will be to research an innovator who was connected to the World’s Fair.  The final result of this project will be a round table in which you dress up as and act out the part of your innovator, presenting important information and participating in a round table discussion with other innovators from the World’s Fair.

Project Options

Below is the list of innovators you can choose from.  We tried to find a wide range of innovators, from artists to advocates for human rights to scientists.  We’ve color coded them so you can easily find an innovator from an area that interests you.  

Categories: Scientist/Entrepreneur Civil Rights/Women’s Rights Artist/Musician/ Entertainer

• Jane Addams - Jane Addams was an American settlement activist, reformer, social worker, sociologist, public administrator and author. She was an important leader in the history of social work and women's suffrage in the United States and advocated for world peace.

• Susan B. Anthony -Susan B. Anthony was an American social reformer and women's rights activist who played a pivotal role in the women's suffrage movement. Born into a Quaker family committed to social equality, she collected anti-slavery petitions at the age of 17.

• George Washington Carver -George Washington Carver was an American agricultural scientist and inventor who promoted alternative crops to cotton and methods to prevent soil depletion. He was the most prominent black scientist of the early 20th century.

• Mary Cassatt - Mary Stevenson Cassatt was an American painter and printmaker. She was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, but lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists.

• Buffalo Bill Cody - William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody (February 26, 1846 – January 10, 1917) was an American soldier, bison hunter, and showman.

• Anna Julia Cooper - Anna Julia Haywood Cooper was an American author, educator, sociologist, speaker, Black liberation activist, and one of the most prominent African-American scholars in United States history.

• Frederick Douglass - Frederick Douglass was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a national leader of the abolitionist movement in Massachusetts and New York, gaining note for his oratory and incisive antislavery writings.

• Thomas Edison - Thomas Alva Edison was an American inventor and businessman who has been described as America's greatest inventor. He developed many devices in fields such as electric power generation, mass communication, sound recording, and motion pictures.

• George Ferris - George Washington Gale Ferris Jr. was an American civil engineer. He is mostly known for creating the original Ferris Wheel for the 1893 Chicago World's Columbian Exposition.

• Julia Ward Howe - Julia Ward Howe was an American poet and author, known for writing "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" and the original 1870 pacifist Mother's Day Proclamation. She was also an advocate for abolitionism and a social activist, particularly for women's suffrage. 

• Sissieretta Jones - Matilda Sissieretta Joyner Jones, known as Sissieretta Jones, was an American soprano. She sometimes was called "The Black Patti" in reference to Italian opera singer Adelina Patti. Jones' repertoire included grand opera, light opera, and popular music.

• Edmonia Lewis - Mary Edmonia Lewis, "Wildfire", was a black American sculptor, of mixed African-American and Native American heritage. Born free in Upstate New York, she worked for most of her career in Rome, Italy. She was the first Black American sculptor to achieve national and then international prominence.

• Helena Modjeska - Helena Modjeska, a Shakespearean actress and advocate for Polish women.

• Annie Oakley - Annie Oakley was an American sharpshooter who starred in Buffalo Bill's Wild West show. Oakley developed hunting skills as a child, in order to provide for her impoverished family in western Ohio. At fifteen, she won a shooting contest against experienced marksman Frank E. Butler, whom she later married.

• Frederick Law Olmstead - Frederick Law Olmsted was an American landscape architect, journalist, social critic, and public administrator. He is popularly considered to be the father of American landscape architecture. Olmsted was famous for co-designing many well-known urban parks with his senior partner Calvert Vaux.

• Simon Pokagon - a member of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, an author, and a Native American advocate.

• Lillian Russel - Lillian Russell, was an American actress and singer. She became one of the most famous actresses and singers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, known for her beauty and style, as well as for her voice and stage presence. Russell was born in Clinton, Iowa, but raised in Chicago.

• Elizabeth Cady Stanton -Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an American suffragist, social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early women's rights movement. 

• Nikola Tesla - Nikola Tesla was a Serbian-American inventor, electrical engineer, mechanical engineer, and futurist who is best known for his contributions to the design of the modern alternating current electricity supply system.

• Ida B. Wells - Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was an African American investigative journalist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

• Frances Willard - Frances Elizabeth Caroline Willard was an American educator, temperance reformer, and women's suffragist. Willard became the national president of Woman's Christian Temperance Union in 1879 and remained president until her death in 1898.

Project Steps

1. Choose an innovator.  Check with your teacher to ensure that your innovator is not already taken.

2. Sign in to Noodletools using your Laurel login.  Start a  new project and make sure it’s shared with your teacher.

3. Begin the research process using Noodletools.  Use the resources outlined by Ms. Rosebrock-Hayes and work through each necessary step.

4. Prepare a 2 - 3 minute biography of your innovator.  This introduction should include:

   1. A very brief background of your innovator

   2. What your innovator’s greatest innovation is

   3. How your innovator is connected to the World’s Fair

5. Make a video to present your innovator’s biographical information. Upload the recording to Canvas.  

6. In addition, prepare for your roundtable discussion.  Your teachers and other members of the Laurel community will ask you specific questions about your innovator and his/her innovations.  How you answer these questions will be part of your grade.  You may have one page of notes (PRINTED) for the roundtable if you’d like.

7. Prepare a costume (as simple or as complicated as you’d like) for the roundtable discussion.

8. Participate in the discussion!  Make your voice heard and be an active member of the roundtable.

9. Reflect on the project.

Project Rubric