Student Directions: Read 2 or more documents. Look at the different pictures and think about how life was during the dust bowl. Discuss with your table about what you learned. What is the Dust Bowl? Why couldn't people grow food or make money? What was life like during that time period for these people? Talk about these questions and fill out your graphic organizers.
Document 1:
During the Dust Bowl, before school, children would have to milk cows, and feed the chickens, horses, and other animals every day. Rural kids had to walk miles just to get to school, but then again children really wanted to go to school and learn how to speak and read.
Document 2:
At school they had mechanics, shop, design, math, writing, and reading classes. Their books weren’t as good as ours are today. Their books had dust in them. Some pages had faded letters that you couldn’t read. For water fountains, they used a water pump. The water wasn’t always clean but it was something to drink. At school they had to recite their homework, which means they had to read their homework to the whole class. Recess time was not much of a recess, since the only thing the children had to play on was a maypole, which is a pole that has chains on it and you swing around it. During a hard windy day, teachers would send children home and they would have to walk backwards because the wind was so hard. After 8th grade, children usually quit to go help on the farm and try to help with food depending if it was a girl or boy.
Document 3:
The worst drought (lack of rain) in United States history hit the southern Great Plains in the 1930s. High winds stirred up the dry soil. This caused huge dust storms that ruined the farmland. The affected region came to be known as the Dust Bowl. It included southeastern Colorado, western Kansas, the panhandles of Texas, Oklahoma, and northeastern New Mexico.
Document 4:
The people of the Panhandle, a barren stretch of land between Texas, Kansas, and New Mexico, owned small family farms. They had no irrigation system, no reservoirs to store water, and no canals to bring water to their farms. When there was enough rain, the Okies in the Panhandle gerw wheat and corn and raised cattle. When there wasn't enough rain, they were forced to sell their livestock and machinery and borrow money from the bank. Every year they gambled with their lives, hoping for enough rain to get by.
Document 5:
The Depression caused the price of wheat and corn to fall so low that it made growing crops unprofitable. When the prices for their crops fell, many couldn't make payments to the banks that helpd their title to their land. By 1932 one thousand families a week in Texas, Oklahoma, and Arkansas were losing their farms to the banks.
Document 6:
The year was 1936. It hadn't rained mroe than a few drops in the Panhandle for five straight years. One day the wind started to blow, and every day it blew harder and harder. The wind blew dry soil into the air and every morning the sun rose only to disappear behind a sky or red dirt and dust. The wind knocked open doors, shattered windows, and leveled barns. Sometimes these winds blew almost 50 miles per hour! This is why it was known as the Dust Bowl.
Document7:
Every morning the house had to be cleaned. Everett Buckland of Waynocka said, "If you didn't sweep the dust out right quick between the storms, you'd end up scooping it out with a shovel."
Document 8:
Many Okies talked about a distant place where there was food, work, sunshine- and clear skies. It was said that thousands of workers were needed in California to harvest a hundred different crops- peaches, pears, tomatoes, potatoes, beans, apples, oranges- the list seemed endless!
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Learn more in Children of the Dust Bowl, by Jerry Stanley
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