One of my strongest and most logical ideas on incorporating the Ranching Frontier into math is through word problems. I would use the western theme in the worksheets I create for my class. I would use problems such as: "If Mr. Brown owns 250 heads of cattle and he has 135 more than Mr. Owens, how many heads of cattle does Mr. Owens have?"
There are countless books on the Wild West and the Ranching Frontier. I would incorporate this theme by reading such books to my class and having books such as Children of the Wild West by Russell Freedman, Eye Witness: The Wild West by Stuart Murray, and Best Little Stories from the Wild West by C. Brian Kelly, among many others, available for my students.
Incorporating the Wild West and Ranching Frontier into my writing curriculum would be really simple after reading about the topic. My students would have the opportunity to write their own short stories and create book reports on the books they read. For their daily journal entry prompts, I would provide interesting questions about some aspect of the West that they could elaborate on freely and creatively. In order to provide them with essay writing skills, I would have them write short research papers on interesting personalities of the Wild West.
Since art is such a creative subject, there are countless ways for students to explore the Old West through it. One way I would bring the Ranching Frontier into my art lessons would be to look at western art in the late 1800's and western art presently. After examining the western drawings of Paul Cameron Smith, for example, they would have the opportunity to draw their own still-life of the Wild West.
In music class, my students would have the opportunity to listen to the evolution of country music throughout the years. We would listen to the folksy country music of the late 1800's, then to the faster, hotter, cowboy jazz of the mid-1900's, and finally to the two-step, cowboy cha-cha country we listen to today. We would then discuss the reasoning behind the evolution of this music and tie it into the growth and development of the west.
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