Lessons

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The title “Before Rosa Parks” loosely links a number of lessons that discuss African-American women who were active in the fight for civil rights before the 1950s. This lesson highlights Ida B. Wells, who worked tirelessly for racial justice in the South, especially concerning lynching.

Children are surrounded – and targeted – by advertisements: on television, the computer, even on their journeys to and from school. Children need specific strategies for reading and talking about advertisements and their impact. Reading Ads with a Social Justice Lens is a series of 13 multidisciplinary mini-lessons that provide such strategies and build critical literacy. The lessons are designed for students in grades K-5 and include suggestions for simple adaptations. These lessons open up important conversations about the relationship between advertisements and social justice. Children will see that they have the power to decide how media will influence them. They will also engage in social justice projects that address some of the unfair messages they find in advertising.

In this lesson, students examine voting rights in the early years of the United States and the causes and effects of the first major expansion of voting rights, which took place in the late 1700s and first half of the 1800s. By the end of the lesson, students will be able to explain where various groups of Americans stood regarding the right to vote before the Civil War, and will hypothesize about what they expect happened next.

In this activity, students in the middle and upper grades will explore whether Obama's selection as the president of the United States marks a new era in America, one where race doesn't matter.

This lesson asks students to interrogate six historical documents that show differing opinions about the conflict in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963.

In this lesson, students will address misconceptions they likely have about Christopher Columbus and the colonization of what is now the United States.

This activity encourages students to reflect on their individual cultures and histories, their backgrounds, the things they grew up with (some that may have been in their control and others that they had no choice about), and their values. In the end, students will begin to enlarge their perspective and recognize diversity of belief and background.

An excerpt from A Whale Hunt, How a Native-American Village Did What No One Thought It Could by Robert Sullivan. This piece is to accompany "Holding Onto Heritage: Native Whale Hunts & Diversity" lesson.