Lesson Plans

411 Result(s)
Grade Range
9-12
Lesson 2: The Social Security Act

This lesson engages students in the debate over the Social Security Act that engrossed the nation during the 1930s.

Grade Range
9-12
Sor Juana the Nun and Writer: Las Redondillas and The Reply

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, the first great Latin American poet, is still considered one of the most important literary figures of the American Hemisphere, and one of the first feminist writers. In the 1600s, she defended her right to be an intellectual, suggesting that women should be educated and educators and accusing men of being the cause of the very ills they blamed on women.

Grade Range
K-5
Stories in Quilts

Quilts can be works of art as well as stories through pictures. They also tell a story about their creators and about the historical and cultural context of their creation through the choices made in design, material, and content.

Grade Range
K-5
Beatrix Potter's Naughty Animal Tales

Through studying Beatrix Potter's stories and illustrations from the early 1900s and learning about her childhood in Victorian England, students can compare/contrast these with their own world to understand why Potter wrote such simple stories and why she wrote about animals rather than people.

Grade Range
6-8
The Impact of the Transcontinental Railroad

Students analyze archival material such as photos, documents, and posters, to understand the who was involved in constructing, and the lasting phenomenon of, the Transcontinental Railroad.

Grade Range
6-8
Metaphorical Gold: Mining the Gold Rush for Stories

Explore the Alaskan Gold Rush by "mining" EDSITEment resources for primary texts and period photographs. Just as writer Jack London discovered "metaphorical gold" in the Yukon, students can search several online databases for period details that will enhance their own narratives based on the Gold Rush era.

Grade Range
6-8
Harriet Jacobs and Elizabeth Keckly: The Material and Emotional Realities of Childhood in Slavery

Harriet Jacobs was the first woman to write a slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861). She was born a slave in 1813 in Edenton, North Carolina, and died free in Washington, D. C., at the age of eighty-four. Elizabeth Keckly was born into slavery in 1818 near Petersburg, Virginia. She learned to sew from her mother, an expert seamstress enslaved in the Burwell family.