Lesson Plan - Portraits of an Era

Build Background Knowledge

Before reading the article, have students take the five-question Prereading Quiz at junior.scholastic.com. The interactive quiz is self-scoring and will give an explanation after students answer each question.

Preview Vocabulary

Use the online Skill Builder Words to Know to preteach the domain-specific terms Dust Bowl, economy, empathetic, federal, Great Depression, Great Plains, migrant, New Deal, polio, resilience, sharecropper, and stock market. Have students refer to the Skill Builder as they read.

Read the Article

Read the article aloud or have students read it independently or in pairs. As students read, direct them to mark any surprising information with exclamation marks and any information they have questions about with question marks.

Answer Close-Reading Questions

Have students write their responses, or use the Close-Reading Questions to guide a discussion.

• Who was Dorothea Lange? What is she known for? (Central Ideas)
Dorothea Lange was a photographer who became known for her images of Americans during the Great Depression. She was born in 1895 in Hoboken, New Jersey. In her teens, she learned how to use a camera. Lange moved to San Francisco when she was 22 and built a successful portrait photography business. But when the Great Depression hit, she began taking photos of unemployed men who were standing in breadlines. Then Lange documented the plight of migrant workers and many others affected by the worldwide economic crisis. After the Great Depression, she kept taking photos until her death at age 70 in 1965.

• What is Migrant Mother? What does it symbolize, and why is it so iconic? (Key Details)
Migrant Mother is one of the most reproduced and imitated photos of all time. The image shows the worried face of Florence Owens Thompson, a migrant worker who had come with her family to pick peas at a farm in California, only to have the crop destroyed by frost. The image that became known as Migrant Mother came to symbolize the hard times of the Great Depression and the resilience of Americans in overcoming them.

• How did contracting polio as a child affect Lange? (Cause and Effect)
Lange contracted polio when she was 7 and later said “it perhaps was the most important thing that happened to me.” The disease weakened the muscles in her right leg, leaving her with a limp. Lange biographer Linda Gordon says that Lange used her limp to help her subjects feel more comfortable in front of her camera. The photographer would move slowly, using the time to talk to people and help them relax.

• How does the sidebar “A Decade of Struggle” support the article? (Text Features)
The sidebar supports the article by providing background information about the Great Depression. It helps readers understand the events that Lange documented by explaining that the tailspin started with the crash of the U.S. stock market on October 29, 1929. Many businesses closed, people lost their life savings, and about one in four Americans were unemployed by 1933. People in the Great Plains experienced additional challenges. When farms began to fail because of the Depression, and then when severe drought hit the region, endless miles of soil dried up and were carried by the wind. It created a huge area called the Dust Bowl. The sidebar concludes by explaining that President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs helped give people jobs and that the Great Depression was mostly over by the end of the 1930s.

• What do you think Lange meant when she said that she took photos on the street “to see if I can just grab a hunk of lightning”? (Making Meaning)
Lange might have meant that she was hoping to capture a striking moment, like that of a lightning strike during a thunderstorm. A “lightning” moment might help Lange achieve her goal of using her photographs “to say something about the despised, the defeated . . . the helpless, the rootless, the dislocated.”

• Summarize the section “Like the Mona Lisa.” (Summarizing)
After Lange visited the pea-picking camp in Nipomo, California, the state rushed to send food to the migrant workers there. When the San Francisco News and other newspapers around the U.S. published her photographs, Americans were able to see what the lives of people who were struggling were like. Lange continued to capture the plight of migrants who were forced to move because of the Great Depression, along with sharecroppers who struggled to earn money farming on other people’s land. She also captured moments of everyday life, such as children playing. Lange stopped working for the government in the 1940s. She continued taking photographs until she died in 1965, but her images of the Great Depression remain her most famous. Migrant Mother is so famous that people have compared it to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and a scholar says it “can help anchor our understanding of the past.”

Analyze Photographs

Guide students to complete the Skill Spotlight activity at the end of the article. Help them cite specific details from the photographs in their responses. Then have students use the Analyze Images Skill Builder to examine three photographs from the article or online slideshow. You might choose one of the photos to analyze as a class using quadrants: Cover the image with four sticky notes virtually or using a document camera. Then remove the sticky notes one by one and guide students to analyze details.

Assess Comprehension

Assign the 10-question Know the News quiz, available in PDF and interactive forms. You can also use Quiz Wizard to assess comprehension of this article and three others from the issue.