Dear Educator:

We have begun casting for the major roles in the Frederick Douglass TV program, the first in the Young American Heroes series funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

We will post photos and information on the professional actors who will play the lead characters on our website www.youngamericanheroes.com in a few weeks.

Meanwhile, the latest draft of the script for the half-hour public television program has also been posted. Please take a look—and encourage your students to read it also—and give us your feedback, especially on the way the contemporary middle school students are written. We have another week or so before we start shooting key scenes and want to get all the feedback we can on our script, locations, props and costumes before we begin! Post your responses on our message boards.

Many students and teachers have responded already to our Casting Call to volunteer as extras. We’ll be getting back in touch with you in early May to let you know when we will hold those casting sessions. We’ll also post that information on www.youngamericanheroes.com

At the recent Northeast Regional Conference for the Social Studies in New Haven we taped interviews with several teachers and you can hear their comments at www.youngamericanheroes.com also. Among the teachers who talked with us are:

• Brian Hendrickson, 6th Grade Social Studies Teacher at Hillcrest Middle School in Trumbull, Conn.;
• Tedd Levy, a retired U.S. History and Social Studies teacher from Nathan Hale Middle School in Norwalk, Conn., now an educational consultant based in Old Saybrook;
• Brian Grindrod, 7th and 8th Grade Geography & U.S. History Teacher at Read School, Bridgeport, Conn.;
• Mike Breen, 10th -12th Grade U.S. History Teacher at Rockville High School in Vernon, Conn.; and
• Derrick Magoun, also a 10th-11th Grade U.S. History Teacher at Rockville High.

We’d also like to thank the two schools in which we ran focus groups with students to get input on our script and interactive website activities: Tomlinson Middle School in Fairfield and Roton Middle School in Norwalk.

We’ll be “road testing” the classroom curriculum – including the TV program and interactive Web activities -- in two Connecticut schools during the first two weeks in June. More on that to come!

Thanks to all who have already logged onto the website, posted messages, sent emails and helped spread the word about this collaboration of teachers, students, curriculum designers and TV producers to develop a break-the-mold way of teaching American history and civics to middle school students.

www.YoungAmericanHeroes.com

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