Classroom Resources

This activity is designed for use with our free curriculum kit, Mighty Times: The Children's March, designed for the middle and upper grades.

This activity is designed for use with our free curriculum kit, Mighty Times: The Children's March, designed for the middle and upper grades.

This activity is designed for use with our free curriculum kit, Mighty Times: The Children's March, designed for the middle and upper grades.

This activity is designed for use with our free curriculum kit, Mighty Times: The Children's March, designed for the middle and upper grades.

This is the second lesson in a series on gender expression [23]. 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 [23]. 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 series helps students understand why gender stereotypes are unfair and how teasing or bullying someone who does not conform to gender norms prevents a safe classroom community.

The four lessons in this unit explore different aspects of gender for today’s girls and women. Each lesson identifies barriers that limit girls’ and women’s opportunities and asks students to explore how those barriers can be dismantled.

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. [41]”  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 [48]. 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 [48] 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 [48] 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 [48] 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 [48] 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.

Most textbook accounts of the 1950s and 1960s civil rights movement focus on the actions of Martin Luther King Jr. and epic events in Alabama, Mississippi and Georgia. However, before Birmingham, Freedom Summer and Selma, there was the 1957 Little Rock, Arkansas Central High School desegregation crisis. Led by state NAACP President, Daisy Bates, Little Rock African Americans made their city the most significant test case for the United States Supreme Court’s 1954 and 1955 Brown v. Board of Education rulings, which declared segregated schools to be unconstitutional.

This lesson is part of The Little Rock Battle for School Integration [66] series. The series introduces students to the actors and events central the 1957 Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis. 

This lesson is part of The Little Rock Battle for School Integration [66] series, which introduces students to the actors and events central to the 1957 Little Rock Central High School desegregation crisis.

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 [73]”—one that is wider, more inclusive and will continue to affect our political process.

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 [78], which provides students opportunities to discuss what they know and don't know about accessibility, ableism and stereotypes regarding people with disabilities.

This lesson is part of the series, Picturing Accessibility: Art, Activism and Physical Disabilities [78], which provides students opportunities to discuss what they know and don’t know about accessibility, ableism, and stereotypes regarding people with disabilities.