Baseball

Objectives

• Students will use the Internet to do research and inquiry on baseball.
• Students will browse photographs of baseball cards from different eras.
• Students will design their own baseball card from a specific era, using a computer design program or sketching by hand.

Description

The American Memory Web site is one of the online resources provided by the Library of Congress, the official research facility of Congress and also the largest library in the world.

Suggested Activities

• Have students come up with statistics for themselves and write them on the backs of their baseball cards. How many stolen bases did they have in a season? how many home runs did they hit?
• Show students how to figure out a player's batting average.

Level Activities

• Have students go to http://www.exploratorium.edu/baseball/.Then have students:
click on How Far Can You Hit One?, and read the article. Then have students click on Ricky Henderson at the bottom of the page to learn how different weather conditions affect batting.
click on Tools of the Trade, and then click on Rex Bradley halfway down the page to learn about the history of bat design. Then have students create a design for a bat of the future.
choose an activity from the Activities section in the lower lefthand corner to complete either at home or during recess and share their results with the class.