Category: lesson plan
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Debunking the Thanksgiving Myth
The time around the Thanksgiving is my favorite time of year. I love fall colors, the smell of the fire, and fall foods. I also love the idea of gratitude and that this is a time of thankfulness and reflection. However, there are so many myths surrounding Thanksgiving, some of which are downright lies, that…
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Ancient Egypt Unit – Chicken Mummification
Teaching and learning should be fun and interesting, and few things have piqued my 5th grade ancient civilization classes’ interest more than mummifying a chicken. There’s something about this project that they just can’t keep their eyes or ears away from, and every year my students come away from it knowing the mummification process and…
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Weighing the Pros & Cons of being part of the British Empire
I was bored with the usual lessons about the Causes of the American Revolution. For many years when teaching the Causes, I’ve talked about taxes, taxes, taxes with a smattering of protest and violence, and an ultimate break from the British Empire. I wanted to be more creative. I wanted my students to think about…
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Using Ancient Civilizations to Teach Citizenship
Besides learning a TON from fellow educators at the NCSS 2019 conference in Austin, Texas, I was also lucky enough to be able to give a presentation on Friday afternoon. The link below will direct you to a Google Drive folder with the lessons I presented in “Using Ancient Civilizations to Teach Citizenship.” A couple…
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Writing with Primary Sources in Middle School
Each year around this time my eighth graders and I are finishing up their research papers. The assignment asks students to write a thesis-driven paper about a topic of their choice as seen through a particular lens. (Want to find out more about lens questions? Check out this post!) One of the requirements for student…
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Ancient Greek Women & Gender Norms
I am very excited about this lesson I created for my 5th grade and I wanted to share it with you. As a world history teacher in addition to teaching American history, I find it difficult in many cases to find ways to teach Ancient history from different lessons. Ancient Greece, however, is turning out…
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Race & Judicial Review
After our study of Marbury v. Madison, we have always had students look at judicial review through a modern lens. For many years, students studied and argued federal Supreme Court cases related to children and education. They could choose to work with cases such as Tinker v. DesMoines or NJ v. TLO. This year, however,…
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Political Efficacy & Midterm Elections
Happy Election Day, everyone! Today is an exciting, celebratory day in my classroom. Over the past couple of days my young citizens have been exploring the candidates in their legislative districts in order to be informed. We’ve been discussing why midterm elections matter, why their opinions count even though they are still too young to…
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Spotting Fake News
To open the year, our department began with defining and giving students tools to identify “fake news.” Fake news is defined as stories that appear to be true and appear to be from an official news site, but are untrue or have very little truth to them (Cnn10.com). It is especially true in today’s world…
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Invisible Founders: Pride Month Lesson Plans
I realize I’m somewhat delinquent in posting- the end of the year is tough. Professional development takes up a lot of my time, plus I’m hanging out with my family and taking summer courses. However, loyal readers, I bring you my lessons for Pride Month. In keeping with our philosophy of our classes being windows…