Classroom Resources

This art activity helps children reflect on the meaning of safety and share individual needs with classmates.

This activity exemplifies how through community building and music students can stand up to hurtful bullying.

Debunk everyday stereotypes and liberate expression for students with this classroom activity.

In this lesson, students consider what it means to be an American, using an opinion piece about the “American Identity Crisis” and several related videos as central texts. They answer a series of text-dependent questions, debate their opinions, write a brief constructed response, and make their own video that reflects their interpretation of “the face of America.”

This lesson is the fourth and final in a series called “Family Tapestry.” One goal of these lessons is to help students recognize and accept differences among themselves and within the larger community. Another is to recognize how each student’s unique family contributes to a richer society. As students begin to understand themselves better, learning opportunities to explore biases and prejudices will likely emerge. In this lesson, students will synthesize everything they’ve learned throughout the series to create a quilt that tells the story of their families and how those families contribute to their overall classroom community.

This is the second lesson in a series on gender expression. The goal of the series is to help students understand how gender stereotypes can lead to bullying and stand in the way of building a safe classroom community.

This is the fourth lesson in a series on gender expression. The goal of the series is to help students understand how gender stereotypes can lead to bullying and stand in the way of building a safe classroom community.

In today's multicultural schools and classrooms, resolving conflict means being culturally aware.

This is the final lesson in a series on gender expression. The goal of the series is to help students understand how gender stereotypes can lead to bullying and stand in the way of building a safe classroom community.

One of the most empowering ways to overcome the damage done by internalized gender stereotypes is to counteract them actively—on a daily basis as well as in a broader sense. Children benefit from participating in such activism because it helps them understand the socially constructed nature of gender. Activism also encourages constructive change so that they are not damaged by stereotypes.

In this lesson, students will discuss the meaning and nature of activism. They will brainstorm daily strategies they can use against gender stereotypes. They will also come up with ideas for bigger social action projects in their schools and communities.

Most history textbooks include a section about Rosa Parks in the chapter on the modern civil rights movement. Students are familiar with her story: Parks, an African-American woman, refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery, Alabama bus to a white man. Her act of defiance sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott that became a cornerstone of the mid-twentieth-century movement for African-American equality.

However, Rosa Parks is only one among many African-American women who have worked for equal rights and social justice. This series introduces four civil rights activists who may be unfamiliar to students. Two of the lessons focus on women who lived and worked before the modern civil rights movement; the other two on those who have lived and worked more recently.

This lesson is part of a series called “Beyond Rosa Parks: Powerful Voices for Civil Rights and Social Justice.”  The series introduces students to African-American civil rights activists who may be unfamiliar.

In this lesson, students will learn about Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded the Daytona National and Industrial School for Negro Girls (now Bethune-Cookman College), in 1904. They will discover that Bethune was working for African-American equality decades before the modern civil rights movement. They will also see how profoundly Bethune’s early experience of discrimination affected her life. Through close reading, they will explore connections among Bethune’s life, their own lives, other things they have read, and current and past events.

In this third lesson, students will read an excerpt of an interview given by Mary McLeod Bethune, who founded the Daytona Normal and Industrial School for Negro Girls (now Bethune-Cookman College) in 1904. Bethune became a nationally-renowned educator and was, informally, an advisor to President Franklin Roosevelt. 

Children see and hear advertisements constantly. Television shows, radio stations, websites, even most streets and sidewalks are peppered with advertisements. Children need to be explicitly taught about these media messages. It is important for children to develop vocabulary and critical reading skills that allow them to talk and think about the role advertising plays in their lives, so that they can make increasingly conscious and conscientious choices about how they will respond.

Children are surrounded – and targeted – by advertisements: on television, the computer, even on their journeys to and from school. Children need specific strategies for reading and talking about advertisements and their impact. 

Reading Ads with a Social Justice Lens is a series of 13 multidisciplinary mini-lessons that provide such strategies and build critical literacy. The lessons are designed for students in grades K-5 and include suggestions for simple adaptations.

These lessons open up important conversations about the relationship between advertisements and social justice. Children will see that they have the power to decide how media will influence them. They will also engage in social justice projects that address some of the unfair messages they find in advertising.

Advertisements do more than just sell products; they play a role in creating and perpetuating stereotypes as well. We can reduce the power advertisements have to reinforce stereotypes by teaching children to identify and analyze stereotypical messages.

This is the sixth lesson in the Reading Ads with a Social Justice Lens series.

Advertisements’ biased representations can affect our perceptions of others. For example, ads may show some groups of people more than others. They may also represent people in ways that reinforce stereotypes and biases. Children need to be taught to notice which groups are underrepresented or misrepresented in advertisements, particularly when the ads are in their own communities.

This is the eighth lesson in the Reading Ads with a Social Justice Lens series.

Advertisements often send constructed messages about how families are supposed to look, implying, for instance, that all families should live in houses and have a lot of money or that parents should be heterosexual. Only by recognizing these messages can children learn to avoid their often harmful effects such as marginalizing kids whose families are different, or whose homelife is different.

This is the eleventh lesson in the Reading Ads with a Social Justice Lens series.

Children need empowerment strategies for what to do when faced with biased messages. In other words, they need to learn how to look critically at stereotypes without letting them in, to see and be conscious of biases without taking them on. By thinking through these strategies collectively and explicitly, children become better prepared to view media with a powerful, active and critical eye.

“Whites should only be afraid of becoming a minority if it’s within the old definition of what a minority means—marginalized, left out, disenfranchised. The new American mainstream is inclusive. Everybody is welcome to the new mainstream.” —Trend Tracker Guy Garcia

This lesson—the first in The Little Rock Battle for School Integration series—introduces students to important actors and events in the 1957 Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis.

Students will learn about how Daisy Bates’ experiences as a black girl growing up in the Jim Crow South prepared her to be a civil rights leader. Orphaned after the rape and murder of her birth mother when she was just a baby and stymied by a grossly unequal segregated educational system, Bates dedicated herself to increasing opportunities for future generations of African Americans. In her crusade for equal education, Bates used her identity as a victim of Jim Crow segregation to support her leadership and her cause. In this sense, Daisy Bates’ personal story became the foundation for her political civil rights activism in Little Rock.

In 1957, Daisy Bates became a household name.  When her efforts to integrate Little Rock’s Central High School were met with steadfast resistance from local segregationists, she refused to compromise black children’s constitutional right to equal education—triggering a violent confrontation that captured the attention of the nation. President Eisenhower was forced to send federal troops into Little Rock to enforce racial school desegregation and restore law and order.   The President’s action made Daisy Bates, one of the few African-American women with a formal leadership role in the growing civil rights movements of the 1950s, an instant celebrity. 

The Associated Press named her the 1957 Woman of the Year in Education. The NAACP bestowed her with its highest honor, the Spingarn Medal. She gave keynote addresses across the United States. In 1963, Bates was the only woman to address the crowd at the historic March on Washington, where Dr. Martin Luther King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

In this lesson, students will read excerpts from Daisy Bates’ 1962 memoir, The Long Shadow of Little Rock, and examine the intersection of personal and political in their own lives.

This lesson is part of The Little Rock Battle for School Integration series, which introduces students to the actors and events central to the 1957 Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis.

In this lesson, students will learn about the nine African-American students who integrated Little Rock’s Central High School in 1957. They will also explore the price the Little Rock Nine paid as they created history, as well as the controversies surrounding Daisy Bates and her role in the movement. They will also develop an awareness of the important role the Little Rock Nine played in the civil rights movement and how they inspired the activism of other youth in the Black Freedom Struggle.

Especially during election season, American politicians like to accuse each other of backing ideas and policies that are “outside the mainstream.” But what really characterizes that mainstream? And does it change over time? The video documentary “America by the Numbers: Clarkston, Georgia” makes the case that there is a “new mainstream”—one that is wider, more inclusive and will continue to affect our political process.

Maria Hinojosa and her crew use numbers to help tell the story of Clarkston. By itself, the demographic data is useful because it’s concrete. It shows us how much our nation has changed in just the last few decades. But with its focus on Clarkston, the documentary puts those numbers in a context that makes them real to us. The numbers now tell a story.

Over the last few decades, people with physical disabilities have fought hard for civil rights. Their struggles have led to the passage of federal and state legislation mandating greater efforts at accessibility, as well as to an increase in local conversations about equity for people with disabilities.

This lesson is part of the series, Picturing Accessibility: Art, Activism and Physical Disabilities, which provides students opportunities to discuss what they know and don't know about accessibility, ableism and stereotypes regarding people with disabilities.

Visual symbols and icons have played an important role in accessibility movements. Understanding the meaning and significance of these symbols is important for children— it helps them read the world around them and think about diverse methods of communication. This lesson exposes children to several commonly used icons for accessibility and gives them the opportunity to act out scenarios where the icons might be especially useful. It also introduces the idea of universal design, an approach to making the world usable for all people.

This lesson is part of the series, Picturing Accessibility: Art, Activism and Physical Disabilities, which provides students opportunities to discuss what they know and don't know about accessibility, ableism, and stereotypes regarding people with disabilities.