Online Lesson Plans (Prek-12) | Lessons PreK-8 | Lessons 9-12
 Online Projects: PreK-8 | Online Projects:  9-12 | SASinSchool: Social Studies ,
American Literature | Source Documents | Photos

 The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed

The Black Past is a website dedicated to providing excellent reference materials on the past six centuries of African American history.  (Resources include an online encyclopedia with biographies of significant players in African American history, source documents, major speeches, and more)

On the PBS website you'll find profiles of famous African Americans, Educational Resources and Lesson Plans, (including 9-12 grade science lessons on DNA), a video clip introduction to the series and links to additional online resources.

Profiles include accounts of those who have overcome incredible odds to make valuable contributions to the world. The profile of Ben Carson is an excellent one to use with elementary and middle school students.

United Steaming

• A keyword search for African American History finds 121 videos, 283 clips, 100 GREAT calendar events, 100 images, and 85 articles. Most of the video clips also include lesson plans. If you need more information about your account, talk to your site librarian or email Karen Eccles.

Online Lesson Plans (PreK-12 Lessons)

• Federal Resources for Educational Excellence is a website with free teaching and learning resources from the federal government.  GREAT photos, documents, and online tours. For a few samples:
  
  Our Shared History: African American Heritage (Excellent Underground Railroad resources.)
  Historic Places of the Civil Rights Movement
  American RadioWorks: Remembering Jim Crow
  A Interactive Timeline of African American History
  Black History Month at the Library of Congress
   

• Teacher's Guides to Black History Month from the University of Illinois, Urbana campus.
   

• Black History Teaching Resources from the Smithsonian
   

• The ED SITEment web site has a large collection of Civil Rights lesson plans for grades k-12. You can use a scroll down menu at the top of the page to sort the lessons by grade level. After choosing your grade level in the pull-down menu, click display. (In the Subject Navigator Choose: U.S. History-African American or U.S. History-Civil Rights.)
   

• Scholastic.com's Celebrate African American Heritage Unit has lessons and resources for all grade levels. 
   

• Students will want to enter the Breaking Barriers in Sports and Life essay contest. Essays are due March 3, 2008
   

• Watch a video interview with Sharon Robinson about her father, baseball legend, Jackie Robinson

• Watch a video of Christopher Paul Curtis and lead a literature discussion of The Watsons Go to Birmingham.

• Watch a Video Interview with Dr. Maya Angelou

• They hosted multiple live chats with Rosa Parks over the years. You can read transcripts on their site. They also have a photo journal of her life and many additional resources and lesson plans as well at a section of their site titled: "Rosa Parks: How I Fought for Civil Rights."

• Join the online discussion with Scholastic News Reporters

Lessons (Grades PreK-8)

Literature Based Lessons:

• The Brown Bookshelf: 28 Days Later, A Black History Month Celebration of Children's Literature This site introduces "emerging children's authors of color" for 28 days in February.  Interviews with the authors are excellent as are their recommendations of good works on African American History.

• Recipe for Courage: After students read works on the courage of Rosa Parks, Ruby Bridges, Melba Beal, Harriet Tubman, Jackie Robinson, Martin Luther King, and others, brainstorm a list of the character traits they had that allowed them to demonstrate courage.  Students will determine which traits were most necessary and which played smaller, but equally significant roles as they equate them with the various measures on this black line recipe master. (For example if one of the characters said she had faith that it is what she was meant to do, then the student might choose faith as the 2c. ingredient.  If she said her friend sometimes talked to her in the halls and helped her get through the day, perhaps friendship would go in 1/4 c.)
  (Blackline Master for Writing Project)

Ruby Bridges:

For a transcript and audio interview with Ruby Bridges on KPBS Online Focus.

Ruby Bridges Official Website
The Story of Ruby Bridges  by Robert Coles Through My Eyes by Ruby Bridges

 Scholastic.com has hosted multiple live chats with Rosa Parks over the years. You can read transcripts on their site. They also have a photo journal of her life and many additional resources and lesson plans as well at a section of their site titled: "Rosa Parks: How I Fought for Civil Rights."

Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt by Deborah Hopkinson

Unseen. Unforgotten: When the Birmingham News discovered several unpublished photos of civil rights events in their archives, they posted them on this site with the title: From Negatives to Positives.

• Library of Congress African~American Odyssey This site is a digital collection of rare and unique items related to African American history that are housed in the Library of Congress. It includes pamphlets, letters, political cartoons, photos, manuscripts, music, videos, and news articles. In the section on the

• Civil Rights Era, issues such as African~Americans serving in the military and dying for their country, yet not being allowed equal access are addressed through political cartoons.  Click on the drawing at the left to see a sample. (Courtesy of Dr. Helma Harrington)

• You can also see a page from chapter 10 of the book, Hank Aaron, titled: "I Was Tired of Being Invisible"  describing his strategy for becoming a record-sitting hitter. (When the page loads, hold your cursor near the bottom right edge of any artifact or picture. An icon will appear with four arrows on it. Click on it and the artifact will enlarge.) On the introductory page you can read about the incredible amount of hate mail he received upon breaking Babe Ruth's famous home run record.

• From Slavery to Freedom, The African~American Pamphlet Collection from 1824-1909 This collection includes personal accounts, public speeches, legislative speeches, dramas, and organizational reports. Some of the authors found in this collection are: Frederick Douglass, Charles Sumner, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington.

• Another collection of pamphlets valuable to the study of African~American History can be found at: African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907.

• The Scholastic Web Site
  Culture and Change: Black History in America (Grades k-8)

SASinSchool Software (Grades 9-12) 
Web Version

• To access this outstanding software purchased by PUSD, click on http://www.sasinschool.com . Contact Karen Eccles or your school librarian for information on your password and login, or check the email sent to you earlier this year.  Some sample lessons are described below. A search in SASinSchool for the keywords African American History will bring up a list of links directly to Literature and Social Science lessons.

• Evolution of the Supreme Court:  In this web lesson, students analyze important Supreme Court civil rights cases from the 1850s to the 1990s. They research and summarize the Court's decisions and their impact on African Americans and subsequent civil rights events. The class then creates a PowerPoint® presentation that profiles the cases chronologically in order to identify and discuss the evolution of the Supreme Court's decisions.

• Recipe for Rights:  In this classroom activity, students explore the methods of nonviolent protest used by the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Small groups of students develop a campaign for a contemporary civil rights issue, creating a class presentation that outlines the goals, protest methods, and proposed outcomes of their social action.

• All for One:  In this project, students research one of six African-American civil rights organizations and analyze its impact on the struggle for civil rights during the 1950s and 1960s.

• African American Autobiography:  In this web lesson, students research the lives of two African American writers, George Moses Horton and Frederick Douglass. They analyze selected quotations from their autobiographical works and discover the external causes and internal motivations that led Horton and Douglass to become professional writers, despite the oppressions of slavery.

• Character and Plot in A Raisin in the Sun:  In this classroom activity, students transform their classroom into a stage set and perform scenes from A Raisin in the Sun. They analyze the elements of dramatic characterization and plot development as they read, view, and perform scenes from the play. When they complete their study of the play, students write, perform, and assess a dramatic dialogue of their own.

• Black Boy by Richard Wright:  In this project, students read Black Boy by Richard Wright, create a chart for note-taking purposes, choose from a list of essay topics, and compose a well-elaborated essay. Students conclude their study with a classroom presentation that reveals their response to their reading and the author's literary achievement.