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This is a great site that offers kid-firendly information about voting and voting rights.  It is interactive with timelines, history, ways to get involved and personal stories.

I stumbled upon this website while looking up the Bill of Rights. It's too young for me to use with the majority of my students, but I think it'd be great for fifth grade. It breaks down the Bill of Rights into accessible statements, and they look to have a whole series of pages for kids.

You might use this with kids on Ed Plans or with ELLs, though even some of this vocab might be tough without scaffolding.

This website provides a great breakdown of the Constitution in kid-friendly language. It can be a great resource for lower achieving students who are trying to tackle the often complex language of the document.

I like this site because it is so available for middle school kids. Well worth bookmarking and using.

Game that helps students in grades 5-8 understand what led to the Declaration of Independence.  This is the first of a number of lessons that the kids can take part in.

Tons of information about the US government divided into sections for various grade groups.  I think this would be especially helpful for the younger grades.  The readings are good for all grades but I think that as far as real activities go for older grades, it is lacking.  Overall, easy to use information and helpful for students to use on their own.

This is one of those classic websites, particularly for elementary students. This should be in the repertoire of all elementary teachers, for no other reason, than Constitution Day every September. I also think this is useful for ELL students whose vocabulary is limited but who need to know about US history and government.

This is a handy cheat sheet to compare the major differences between the Federalists and Antifederalists. It also includes an activity called "Who would say that?" that would help kids to apply their knowledge.

This is a great site for middle and high school. Emily, now I see where you got your material for your lesson.

I love this game about the Constitutional Convention. It has lots of great videos for students to watch that are entertaining and clearly explain what was going on. Kids go through representing one state and vote on parts on the constitutional convention and then they see how each state actually voted. Some of the links are broken, but most work well. The game takes a while - at least 45 minutes (and is maybe a little too long), but I think kids would be engaged and would walk away with a great base understanding of how the Constitutional Convention went and what it was like to be there.

Designed for 4th through 12th grade, has pre quizzes, an interactive tour and post quizzes. Solid explanations of processes, understandable by kids around middle school age and up, not dumbed down though. I can see having this as a center-type activity.

VERY useful for intermediate and middle. Definitely a keeper!

This chart shows how many electoral votes each state had between 1981-90, 91-2000, and 2001-10. Could be useful when teaching contemporary elections - and could be particularly helpful when looking at demographic patterns - inferences galore to be made!

Here is a nice opinion piece by the NYT regarding the Electoral College: http://www.nytimes.com/video/opinion/100000001821730/electoral-college-101.html?ref=electoralcollege

Albert, I loved this article and the trailer. The best quote from the trailer is the last line: Interviewer: What is democracy? Kid: It's a type of ... disease.

This page includes a range of posts supporting "yes" and "no" views on whether kids should have the right to vote. Teachers could use the page as supplemental reading for a Voting Rights lesson, as a scaffold to a whole-class debate, or as a model for creating a class blog where students can debate the topic.

This a is a topic list organized by Cornell Law of decisions made by the Supreme Court. Good resource for possible research projects.

Tough read for kids but great background for teachers.

This might be a stretch for elementary and middle school. But I think it's workable for 8th grade and beyond. The lesson has students learning about the distinction between a democratic republic and direct democracy using Federalist paper No. 10

Agreed about the stretch. I would even say this is too tough for grade 8 since the vocab is dense. Would need a lot of infrastructure to get kids prepared.

This website breaks down Thomas Jefferson's role in writing the Declaration of Independence using child friendly language for elementary students. Other areas of the website include more background information on Jefferson and Monticello.

Elementary students can use this website to understand how a bill becomes a law. The process is broken down in child friendly language and there is a great interactive glossary. Students can hover the mouse over a word and the definition will pop up.

This is awesome Laura! Great find!

Primary Source Document of the Magna Carta is a good document to compare with the Declaration of Independence.  

I suspect elementary kids would have trouble with this. You might show them the actual wording but give them a masterfully watered down version.

I wish I had found this site back in September! I really like all of the resources laid out on this website, it's easy to navigate, and something I could imagine letting my students explore too. I especially had fun playing "Which Founder Are You?" Turns out I'm George Mason.

I was just doing the election of 1800 with my class and used this entertaining video to introduce a mini-project on the 1800 campaign. It used actual words that the mouthpieces of Adams and Jefferson used to produce a modern-day attack ad

I love this! High schools kids are sophisticated enough to read between these lines and I can imagine you have fun with this!

Written by historian Paul Finkelman, a very opinionated takedown of Jefferson that could be used as part of a critical study of slavery and the founders. I tried to preface our look at the article with a discussion of the dangers of judging historical figures by contemporary standards, but most kids remained firmly in the "monster" camp anyway

This is a great American History website aimed at elementary students. They break down the articles nicely for younger readers. One thing I don't love about it is how the search works - it goes from kid friendly to something that looks more overwhelming and adult. The site is really easy to explore and perfect for beginning researchers and historians.