"150 Years of Literacy in Iowa" began as a project to focus on Iowa's Sesquicentennial and the level of literacy in Iowa. The project was undertaken by fourth and fifth grade classes at Harrison Elementary School in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Three classrooms were studying Iowa and its place in the history of the United States. They were able to find out a lot of information for the website. Those classes and their teachers: Helen Kane, Jamie Preston (later Jamie Moran), and Eileen Crowley worked very hard for a number of weeks to interview people, write letters, and compile information to tell a story about Iowa and its attitude towards literacy and the level of literacy through the years. Three other classes and their teachers: Kim Russ (later Kim Klostermann), Lisa Greif, and Candi Lynch conducted research and collated opinions to create three more web pages. Jim Jacobmeyer, a gifted and talented resource specialist for the district, helped us a lot on this website by organizing a design group which helped create graphics and search for information.

In addition to searching for information in our own school's library media center, students used reference books, resources at the Cedar Rapids Public Library, vertical files, CD-ROM reference sources, the Internet, phone interviews, in-person interviews, letters, surveys, a modem access to the Library of Congress's card catalog, and other miscellaneous sources. They found that their great-great-great-great grandparents might have ridden a horse to a one-room school house to learn to read and write using McGuffy's readers and slate writing tablets. Over 100 years later they were attending a 19 classroom neighborhood school with a library media center and classrooms filled with books and reading material. And while they wrote with pencil and paper they were also able to write their summaries of research projects on the computer and post the information for the world to see.

If you have some comments about these pages or any information you think should be added please e-mailus.