ESE 3800 Greene--Planning for Social Studies

Featuring videos, slides, and worksheets

Featuring videos, slides, and worksheets

Featuring videos, slides, worksheets, and cases to watch

Written for older students, could be easily modified for grade 3-4; could also be modified to showcase other governmental representatives.

The lessons in this unit provide an opportunity for students to learn about and discuss two U.S. families in which both the father and son became President. Students will address questions such as: What types of people might become President of the United States? What type of training as a child do you think these father/son pairs had to enable them to become President?

Through these lessons, students learn about the roles and responsibilities of the U.S. president and their own roles as citizens of a democracy.

This activity is designed to help students understand the process and procedures of the first day of Congress by re-enacting them in the classroom. Students have the opportunity to focus on and retain the key elements of beginning a new Congress, including electing a Speaker, taking the Oath of Office, choosing House Officers, and voting on the House Rules.

This activity is designed to familiarize students with the legislative process and increase the students awareness of their district Representative and the responsibilities of Members of the U.S. House of Representatives.

In this unit, students will learn what a symbol is and how this particular symbol—the American flag—is an important part of our everyday lives. Learning the history of the flag will help instill in students respect for our national symbol and help them learn appropriate etiquette regarding our flag. Students will learn that other symbols of our country, such as the president and certain holidays, like Flag Day, are important to us as well. Students can also contribute symbols from their familial, ethnic and national cultures to show the diversity of American society and its links to other parts of the world. There are also lesson plans for the Statue of Liberty and the National Anthem.

What makes the U.S. Capitol "symbolically important"? Presented with a variety of archival documents, your students can answer that question for themselves. Working in small groups, the students will uncover and share the Capitol's story. The primary sources are presented to the students as mysteries, with a challenge to tie together the information in the documents or images through research.

Good starting point for resources on primary source materials and the Constitution, but lesson plan itself may be designed for an older group of students.

Extensive materials prepared to help students understand the founding of the United States, almost 250 years later. This Teacher's Guide highlights EDSITEment resources in history, civics, literature, arts, and culture that bring these events and discussions into the classroom. Lesson plans have a description which includes grade bands.

Help your students understand the development of the Declaration as both a historical process and a compositional process through role play, creative writing, an introduction to important documents and a review of historic events.

This unit is part of Gilder Lehrman’s series of Common Core State Standards–based teaching resources. These units were written to enable students to understand, summarize, and analyze original texts of historical significance. Students will demonstrate this knowledge by writing summaries of selections from the original document and, by the end of the unit, articulating their understanding of the complete document by answering questions in an argumentative writing style to fulfill the Common Core State Standards. Through this step-by-step process, students will acquire the skills to analyze any primary or secondary source material.

Students will read and analyze articles from an eighteenth-century newspaper in order to explore how a single event in one Virginia community helped to turn people against Great Britain as the Revolutionary War approached.