Walden, a game EDU: Lost in the Shuffle Cards

This simple card game is an exercise for the Walden, a game EDU "Where I Lived" module found here: Info Where I Lived — Walden, a game

In this procedural story telling activity, students will consider different stories about Walden Woods as generated by drawing from different sets of cards that tell the story from different perspectives. Each hand you draw tells a new story.

To begin, the teacher will display the following introductory sentence on a physical or digital whiteboard: “Henry Thoreau lived in the woods on the shore of a pond named Walden, near a town called Concord, in Massachusetts" and ask the students: “How can we finish telling this story?”

The teacher will then distribute at least three custom decks to students. Each deck will include two categories that are different combinations of card categories. For example:

• Indigenous peoples and Environment
• Enslaved peoples and Industry
• Indigenous peoples and enslaved peoples
• Thoreau and Indigenous peoples
• European Americans and enslaved peoples

Students will shuffle their custom deck and draw five cards at random.

Starting with the intro sentence on the whiteboard, they will read each card out loud to a peer or group, as if it is part of a story.

At the end of the readings, the teacher will prompt them to think about the ways that each of the stories do or do not reflect our classic understanding of the history of Walden Pond.