My Town

Princeville, NC, the oldest town in the United States incorporated entirely by African Americans, is the focus of a 31-page packet that not only traces the history of the town, but also examines the challenges that city has faced over...

From the essential question about the cause of the American Revolution to a Town Hall meeting hosted by and for your social studies class, a set of American history lessons are a great addition to your Revolutionary War unit. After...

Tim Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name is the anchor text in a unit study of the history of race relations and the civil rights struggle in the South. The 11 lessons are richly detailed and the unit deserves a space in your curriculum library.

Approach ethical online behavior with a series of activities geared toward teaching pupils about digital citizenship. After a brief discussion about ethics, small groups inspect a fictional social networking profile with ethics in mind....

Who was Walt Whitman, and what link does he have to president Abraham Lincoln?  After Lincoln's assassination, Whitman wrote "O Captain! My Captain!" This poem and "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" are the focus of exercises...

No matter what subject you're teaching, you'll find some fun and innovative ideas for using newspapers in your classroom with a helpful resource. Based on Getting the Most Out of Teaching with Newspapers by Rebecca Olien, the series of...

While Anne Franks is certainly the most recognized diarist of the Holocaust Era, she was by no means the only one. To broaden their understanding of what was happening throughout Europe at this time, groups examine diary entries from 15...

Word splashes, read-draw-talk-write activities, exhibits. Middle schoolers use the Storypath approach to a unit study of America's concerns during the Cold War and the Cuban Missile Crisis. Teams organize a 21st century world's fair,...

Here is a fascinating human geography study of the Zabbaleen. They are a sub-class of people who work as garbage collectors in Cairo, Egypt. I can't say enough good things about this resource in my limited space here. It is fabulous! If...

Students read excerpts from Peter Hessler's River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze and discuss his difficulties in learning the language, cultural clashes and how cultural perceptions shape our understanding of the world.