President's Day: Creating a Trifold Brochure

Learning Objectives:
1. Evaluate examples of historical trifold brochures.
2. List qualities of a good trifold brochure.
3. Locate pictures and research facts about a museum /historical location to include in the brochure.
4. Create an attractive, well written, historically accurate brochure to attract visitors to a historical location/ museum.

Summative Assignment

Outcome: Students will create a historically accurate, well written trifold brochure to attract visitors to a historical location or museum and share that brochure with classmates.

Assignment Description: There are many purposes for historical writing in addition to a research paper. Historians who curate museums and historical sites may be asked to create a trifold brochure to attract visitors to their site. Our students can model this process of sharing historically interesting information that also markets a location to visitors to increase visitation. First, students should become familiar with trifold brochures by examining and evaluating qualities of some brochures that they think effectively convey information and draw visitors to their site. Instructors should select a theme from a certain period to compliment the current unit of study and assign each student a different location. For the purposes of this post, we will use historic homes of U.S. presidents. Students should then research their location and collect interesting facts, images, and other information that would be appropriate for the brochure. Finally, the student will create the brochure and share it with classmates.

Steps and Instructor Notes:
1. The instructor and students collect examples of historical site brochures and examine commonalities and effectiveness. (Students and instructors can collect these at the airport, restaurants, tourism centers, etc.)
2. The class will visit resources on how to create an effective trifold brochure such as the website at the University of Florida.
3. Students will meet in small groups examining the brochures they collected and discussing what they learned about creating effective trifold brochures. They will create a list of qualities they think should be included in a good brochure. (A collective list created by the class and instructor could be used as an evaluation/rubric tool at the end of the project to grade the trifolds.)
4. The student will research and collect facts and images to include in his/her own brochure about one President’s home.
5. The student will create a visually appealing, grammatically sound and organized trifold brochure that contains accurate historical information about the President’s home.
6. The class will share their brochures with one another. Some assignment options are to have the class evaluate each other’s brochures based on a rubric generated from the discussion the class had about the qualities of a good brochure. The class could also rank the top three brochures based on those qualities. Regardless of how you decide to evaluate the brochures, this sharing part is essential as students will learn about Presidential history and get ideas for later assignments by seeing each other’s work.

Rubric is based on 100 points total but it is likely this assignment would take several days and is very dependent on participation which could be evaluated many different ways. For the purposes of this post, the rubric only evaluates the trifold brochure:
20 points-Student created a trifold brochure that is visually appealing and provides enough content to interest the reader.
10 points- The back panel includes credits and additional contact information.
20 points- The inside three panels contain historically accurate information that informs the reader about the historic home and President.
30 points-Student included at least 1 image and 10 facts regarding the location.
20 points-Overall the student composed a grammatically sound and well organized document.