City Blocks
Second graders use wooden blocks and their imaginations to build a tolerant community in their classroom.
Civil Rights and Americans with Disabilities
Who's Voting Now? is a classroom activity examining the Civil Rights Act and ADA.
Civil Rights and Americans with Disabilities: Early Grades Activity
Assessing Access is a classroom activity examining the Civil Rights Act and ADA for grades 3-6.
Civil Rights and the ADA: Middle Grades Activity
Activism and Legislation is a classroom activity examining the Civil Rights Act and ADA for grades 6-8.
Classroom Activists: How Service-Learning Challenges Prejudice
Veteran middle-school teacher Lisa Weinbaum uses service-learning to challenge students' stereotypes and teach them to be global citizens. Here, she talks with Teaching Tolerance about the power of activism to transform students' lives.
Classroom Community Building
Activities for all grades to build community in your class this year.
Coalescing Across the Globe
Activity exchange for grades 6-8 to explore global differences through pen pals.
Coalescing Across Town
Activity exchange for grades K-5 to understand differences by setting up community pen-pals.
Collective Poetry
Collective poetry is an exercise designed to encourage students to work from a shared pattern in order to join their voices in a collective rhythm.
Committing to Nonviolence: A Lesson from Viva La Causa
Students will explore how the concept of nonviolence affected and united social change movements in the 20th century.
Common Roadblocks
Some individuals may hesitate about adopting practices or policies that advance equality and safety for LGBTQ students.
Communication – The Total Impact of Your Message
Effective conflict resolution models explore the ways others communicate from their cultural norms.
Community Through Photography
Reporting on their communities helps students recognize problems and find strategies for change.
Compassion, Action and Change
In this excerpt from her new book, Black Ants and Buddhists (Stenhouse Publishers ISBN# 1 57110 418, $18), educator and author Mary Cowhey explains how common classroom activities like canned-food drives can actually reinforce student biases. She shares how she challenges her own students to empathize with the suffering of others and uses service-learning to help students debunk stereotypes and stigma.
Conflict Resolution and Peace
Middle and high school teachers can use these quotes from famous individuals to facilitate student reflection on the importance of conflict resolution.
Controversial Issues
Students always have passionate opinions about controversial social topics. They also often become friends with others who reinforce their ideology. And students don’t often possess the skills to disagree gracefully. This activity invites students to cross their ideological boundaries and become friends with others who think differently than they do.
Controversial Subjects in the Classroom
Invariably, issues are raised in classrooms that bring charged responses from students. How can educators set the stage for safe, respectful dialogue and learning?
Cooperation
Activities for The Fighting Mynahs
Cooperative Comics
A Teaching Tolerance activity for grades 4 and up.
Core Samples
Critical Equations
A Rhode Island math teacher offers a new model for analyzing social issues.
Critical Viewer Activity
Help your students take a critical view of advertising.
Crocodile and Ghost Bat Have a Hullabaloo
This tolerance tale can help early grades students understand the consequences of name-calling.
Cubing
National Board Certified elementary school teacher, Kristen Miller, shares how she uses cubing to build higher-order thinking skills with her students.
Culturally Relevant Curriculum
Curriculum, in its most simple, essential, commonly understood form, is the "what" of education. It is crucial to academic performance and essential to culturally responsive pedagogy. Even the most "standard" curriculum decides whose history is worthy of study, whose books are worthy of reading, which curriculum and text selections that include myriad voices and multiple ways of knowing, experiencing, and understanding life can help students to find and value their own voices, histories, and cultures.
Culture in the Classroom
Educators today hear a lot about gaps in education – achievement gaps, funding gaps, school-readiness gaps. Still, there's another gap that often goes unexamined: the cultural gap between students and teachers.
Defenders of Justice
In this activity for grades 3-5, students will summarize biographies of individuals who fought racism and helped make it possible for a black man to serve as President of the United States. Along they way, they'll discover that they, too, can take a stand for justice and equality and make the world a better place today.
Defining Multicultural Terminology
Identifying multicultural terms helps students gain understanding