Sit-ins Teacher Resources

Imagine an old 1960s diner. There's a long, L-shaped counter top and classic diner stools covered in vinyl dotting the counter space. Sounds like your typical diner, doesn't it? A piece of this diner now sits in The Smithsonian. Why?...

Part of the protests of the Civil Rights Movement were small scale sit-ins at lunch counters. This form of on-the-ground activism is the focus of a C-SPAN resource that includes four video-clips about the sit-ins by pupils at a lunch...

What was it like to be a part of the sit-ins during the Civil Rights Movement? Learners consider the question and whether the protests were effective using an online documents-based investigation. The program allows for virtual...

Middle schoolers watch a PowerPoint presentation that includes pictures of a sit-in and participate in a simulated sit-in.  In this sit-in lesson, students perform a sit-in skit based on The Civil Rights Movement for Kids by...

Students watch a video about nonviolent protests during the Civil Rights Movement. They discuss and write about the Greensboro sit-ins while deciding the effectiveness of this type of protest.

More than an iconic image, the picture of young people sitting at a lunch counter in Greensboro, N.C., to protest segregation and Jim Crow laws also sparked a new phase of the civil rights movement. Video clips, including activists,...

Did you know that when you are sitting in your easy chair, you may be moving up to 1000 miles per hour depending on what part of the planet you are sitting on? Consider relative speed by watching this moving video. Boggle brains in your...

Boycotts and bus rides, sit-ins and speeches. The focus of this amazing resource is on those people who were willing to put themselves at risk to take a stand for their belief in equal rights for all. A must-have for your curriculum...

Once again, a teacher is videotaped while lecturing his class when describing how crystals form and grow. It feels like you're sitting in a college classroom and taking a lecture from a very good instructor. His speaking style is...

While sitting in the park, Big Bird recites a Language Arts poem about all of the things that can whistle. It turns out that everything can whistle except Big Bird.

Young scholars investigate probability. They will define probability as the likelihood of an event occurring. Then, they determine the probability of sitting in a particular seat on a plane. They also set up ratios of various seating...

Young historians investigate and evaluate the effectiveness of the strategies the Civil Rights Movement used to end segregation in the United States. After watching an video interview with Carl Matthews and Bill Stevens who participated...

Ezell Blair, Jr., David Richmond, Franklin McCain and Joseph McNeil changed history. Their sit-in at the lunch counter of the Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina on February 1, 1960 became a model for the nonviolent protests that...

What is a Socratic Seminar? Discover this type of discussion and it functions. Split the class into two groups with Group A sitting in an inner circle and Group B in an outer circle. Each person in Group B is assigned to a person in...

Here is another learning game that will engage your kindergartners and support them with their counting fluency. Forming a circle where everyone faces inward, choose a counting sequence (counting frontward or backward) with no more than...

If you have a rotating office chair in your classroom, you can have physics pupils participate in this simple, yet effective demonstration of angular momentum. One partner sits in the chair, arms outstretched, holding heavy weights. The...

Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles provides the text for a fishbowl activity. Class members to sit in concentric circles, with the center circle discussing the topics from the book, and the outer circle observing the...

To gain an understanding of Imperialism, class members read Rudyard Kipling's poem, "The White Man's Burden" and Mark Twain's essay, "To the Person Sitting in Darkness." Groups compare these perceptions of non-white cultures with the...

Bell Ringers that set the right tone for a lesson can be hard to design. Launch a study of the Supreme Court with a video has justices that revealing how they decide what cases to hear, how they determine their rulings, and even why the...

What is science? Sitting in a whole group discussion, scholars first share their ideas on science and how to conduct investigations. They learn about the steps for scientific inquiry and experimentation. Once finished, individuals then...

Sit-ins and boycotts, marches and speeches, songs and demonstrations were hallmarks of nonviolent protest of the civil rights movement. Young scholars research primary and secondary source documents to determine what made nonviolent...

Bonjour! Comment ça-va? Introduce your language learners to French by playing the song "Parce Qu'on Vient de Loin." They attempt to describe what the song says and learn some basic French greetings like bonjour, au revoir, je m'appelle,...

To show little ones the difference between front and back, Elmo gets in a cardboard bus. He sits in the front of the bus and then in the back.

Why does a brown cloud occur in Denver at a certain time of the year? When warm air is higher in the atmosphere, it traps cooler, denser air below and smog just sits in between them. Using bottles of colored hot and cold water, this...