Lesson Plans
Election Day
Students explore, compare, and contrast historical and contemporary reflections about elections in America.
Illustrating America
Students explore the stories we tell when illustrating America through primary source analysis, reflection, and creation.
Women’s Rights: Seneca Falls & Beyond
Students investigate a key event in the history of women's rights and the importance of commemorating the struggle for equal rights, then consider possible contributions to help ensure a future with greater equality.
Community Service: Washington Chapter
Students analyze primary source photographs and newspaper articles to explore the importance of community service then and now.
The Brownies’ Book: I Am an American Citizen
Students analyze an issue of the Brownies' Book to investigate its historical significance and explore how the theme of American citizenship was presented to children back then and could be represented to youth of today.
Chinese Citizenship in Hawaii
Students analyze early 19th-century arguments against citizenship for Chinese immigrants to Hawaii and one journalist's rebuttal to that "defense", then investigate arguments for and against an immigrant group in America today and compare the historical and contemporary debates.
Shrinking Glaciers
Students analyze historical and contemporary maps to calculate glacier loss on Mount Rainier over time, then explore ideas for slowing glacier loss.
Bonus Veterans
Students analyze primary sources to learn about the Bonus Army and to consider the question, How does informing ourselves about the past guide us in the future?
Why We Can’t . . .
Students investigate how a powerful slogan was used by civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. and consider how it might be applicable to a contemporary issue.
Snap a Photo: Agent of Change
Students consider point of view and purpose while they engage in careful observation of Lewis Hine’s photographs that exposed child working conditions, generate and test hypotheses based on evidence, and reflect on their learning by applying it to related questions about a photographer’s point of view or purpose. Teachers may choose to have students extend their inquiry by pairing pictures and poems to tell stories (step 8), then investigate child labor today or another contemporary issue related to children and make connections by writing a poem about a related illustrative image they find (steps 9-10).