This is a guest post from Kasey Short, an eighth-grade English teacher at Charlotte Country Day school in North Carolina. When I moved from 6th to 8th grade last year, one thing I thought about a lot was how I would approach teaching To Kill a Mockingbird. I knew that I wanted to provide historical context as well as the perspective of recent cases in which people of color have been unjustly found guilty. I also wanted to showcase the voices of people who had been wrongly accused and the … [Read more...]
Primary Source Learning: Black American History & Heritage
February 21, 2017 by 3 Comments
Primary Source sets with teacher guides Baseball: Across a Divided Society Harlem Renaissance Jim Crow in America The NAACP: A Century in the Fight for Freedom Guided primary source analysis activities Afro-American Monument An airship with a “Jim Crow” trailer The Brownies’ Book Condition of the descendants of former African slaves The constitutional amendment Jesse Owens President Obama’s 2016 State of the Union Address Tree of Liberty Woman … [Read more...]
Literature Links: To Kill a Mockingbird
June 15, 2015 by 2 Comments
Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the selections in the Books That Shaped America online exhibition. The curator's note reads: This 1960 Pulitzer Prize winner was an immediate critical and financial success for its author, with more than 30 million copies in print to date. Harper Lee created one of the most enduring and heroic characters in all of American literature in Atticus Finch, the small-town lawyer who defended a wrongly accused black man. The book’s importance was recognized … [Read more...]
Primary Source Learning: Great Depression
March 12, 2015 by 4 Comments
Primary source sets & activities American Memory Timeline: Great Depression and World War II 1929-1945, background information with select primary sources & teaching activities American Memory Timeline: Photographing People of the Great Depression Dust Bowl Migration includes teacher's guide Dust Bowl Songs & Photographs Primary Source Learning: Great Depression & World War II Primary Source Set Teaching Now: Determining the Main Idea of a Text Lesson … [Read more...]
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