Kids of all ages were in the one room. There was one teacher. Your classmates might be 10 years older than you!
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Shutterstock.com (Background, Slate Boards); Underwood Archives, Inc./Alamy Stock Photo (Students); Michael Snell/Alamy Stock Photo (Sod Roof); © Rhbabiak13 | Dreamstime.com (Wagon)
Welcome to Your One-Room Schoolhouse
What was school like 150 years ago? Many kids went to schools that had just one room. Imagine what that was like.
From the December 2025/January 2026 Issue
Learning Objective: Students will build background information about one-room schoolhouses to prepare for the Big Read-Aloud.
1. Who would be in your school?
2. What would be on your desk?
slate board
Paper was hard to get. Many schools did not have it. Kids wrote on small slate boards with chalk.
3. What would the school look like?
This is a sod roof.
It might look like a little house. Some schools were made of wood and mud. Some had a roof made of sod. That’s soil with grass!
4. How would you get to school?
Most kids walked to school. Some kids had to walk miles. If your home was too far, your parents would take you in a wagon.
Activities
(2)
Skills Activities
Answer Key
(1)
More About the Article
English Language Arts Focus
Key details
Social Studies Focus
History and Culture
Step-by-Step Lesson Plan
Implementation
- Whole group
Pairings and Text Connections
- In this issue: “Big Read-Aloud: The Schoolhouse Blizzard”
- From the Storyworks 1 archive: “Background Builder: If You Lived 150 Years Ago” (February 2023)
Before-Reading Resources
- Vocabulary slideshow (5 minutes) one-room schoolhouse, classmates, slate boards, sod
Suggested Reading Focus
Build background knowledge (20 minutes)
- Before opening the magazine, ask students to think about what their day is like at school. What do they do? What does their school look like? What does their classroom look like?
- Then tell students that they are going to learn about what it was like for some kids to go to school 150 years ago. Explain that in some parts of the country, kids went to schools that had only one room.
- Walk students through the nonfiction text features of the page. Take a close look at the pictures and ask students to share what they notice.
- Read the mini article. Pause to check for comprehension with each of the bolded vocabulary words.
- Have students share with the group or in partnerships a fact they learned about going to school in one-room schoolhouses 150 years ago. Would they like to have gone to school back then?
After-Reading Skills Practice
Skills: Research/writing facts; key details (15 minutes)
Text-to-Speech