Group items tagged

This is the National Archives' "Charters of Freedom" website. In addition to having full transcriptions of the DOI, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, there are links to many ancillary materials as well. Included in the site are lesson suggestions, other primary source materials, and scholarly essays about the legacy of our Founding Documents.

This site has good pdf links to all the founding documents.  Additionally, it includes a section on using the Constitution and connecting it to current events.  I have used this before in class and it works great (and it includes recent news - from the past week!).  It also includes various lessons to use too.

The Bill of Rights institute offers a wealth of materials for teachers. In addition to copies of each of the Founding Documents and accompanying essays about each, there are many other materials on the site. Among my favorite resources are the many lesson plans made for teachers of all levels.

Although I didn't use this entire lesson, there are some excellent vocabulary and 'anatomy' of the Constitution PDFs that would work well in lower grades and perhaps with ELL students.  Good overview of the structure of government and the powers and duties of the 3 branches. I feel that there is a lot to take from this lesson to use in class.

This is a card-matching game providing students with practice classifying information by culture. Key topics for comparison/contrast and sorting include citizenship requirements, legislative function, selection of the executive, characteristics of a jury, role of trial lawyers, law code, uses of the Death Penalty, use of slavery, position of women. Overall goal of lesson is to provide students with reinforcement of key ideas and talking points for considering the impact of Ancient Athenian and Ancient Roman democracy on the United States.

Great game for middle school students.

This will be perfect for my curriculum. It is nice to have a whole class of researchers helping me out! Have you used this before, Allison?

This collection of images provides a pictorial account of the Suffrage Movement, as well as an historical overview of the National Women's Party, timeline, information on selected leaders of the party, tactics and techniques of the campaign, and Gallery of Suffrage Prisoners. The photo collection is particularly great as a way to show the actions of the NWP.

This website is a great glossary of many Supreme Court cases that dealt with interpreting the Bill of Rights. Some of the topics covered are Religious Liberty, Personal LIberty, Students, Freedom of Speech. This website is a great resource for anyone trying to teach the Bill of Rights through cases.

This website has lots of great resources for teaching the Bill of Rights, but this page does a nice job of organizing landmark cases by rights and giving brief, student friendly summaries which would be really helpful in teaching.

I particularly like the section specifically related to students and The Supreme Court. Thanks.

This is a great, detailed exploration of the timeline of the passage and ratification of the 14th amendment from 1866-1868.The site as a whole provides details and timelines for many of the great events of American history, as covered by Harpers Weekly. It's also a great place to access cartoons for use in class!

Since the 14th amendment is one of the amendments we tend to concentrate on in the classroom, this is a particularly helpful site. There are so many ways to go with the amendment so teachers need to be picky about what they have time to accomplish. With this website, you have a variety of things to consider before figuring out what you will actually do with students in the amount of time you have.

 A huge library of the founding documents and a timeline.  Many of the documents include a glossary.  However, many of the connected sites don't work.  Also just be careful as this website does seem to have a right wing agenda. 

This games has students play each of the branches of government in order to create laws, support and defend them. It's simplified enough for young students (upper elementary and middle school) and very engaging. It takes about 30 minutes to play the whole game, but I was able to get quite a bit out of it in just 10 minutes. It helps to clarify the roles of each of the branches of government and how they work together.

Annenberg materials are always reliable and both the games are certainly usable for upper elementary students.

This gives a sample of the most celebrated documents and milestones in history. I thought it was interesting to be able to click on a plethora of links not on just the Declaration of Independence, Articles of Confederation, Constittution, Bill of Rights but also links to the Emancipation Proclamation, Social Security Act, FDR's "Day of Infamy" speech and much more.

The National Archives is truly a remarkable site. Remember when we had to teach history without the richness of all the documents we can now get online?

This site has a number of podcasts summarizing Supreme Court decisions that influence the rights of students. I like that these podcasts are (mostly) in student-friendly language. I also like the idea of using podcasts as a way of accessing auditory learners and addressing the skill of note-taking and picking out key informaton.

I agree, Becca, that this site is quite accessible for students because of the podcasts. The cases they provide are all ones that could be used in the classroom.

This is an interesting NYT article that discusses America's view of the Constitution, and the impact the Constitution had on the rest of the world. It chronicles the ways other countries were impacted by the Constitution. For instance, countries that created Constitutions strikingly similar to the U.S.

Everyone should read this article! It could be the foundation for one of our online sessions. Note the remark: "America is in danger, I think, of becoming something of a legal backwater" .

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 is a youtube clip of James Earl Jones reading an excerpt of Frederick Douglass's "4th of July Speech" -- As referenced in Week 2's Discussion Thread. For a long time I used this excerpt, because I didn't know about the David Blight podcast. I still think that this version is one of the most dramatic -- after all -- it is James Earl Jones.

Very powerful. I agree, this is great for high school classrooms.

In my search for court cases that would both illustrate the 'enduring legacy' of the Bill of Rights' and be of interest and relevant to younger students, I found this site. Very clear, brief explanations on a timeline of court rulings re: educaction, some of them centering around children's rights.

This is a lesson plan that focuses on freedom of religion, specifically as it pertains to school prayer in the case of Engel v. Vitale (1962). It looks like a case in which students can really invest themselves, and has additional cases to build off of in extension opportunities.

I found this link based off of my previous link of Washington's letter to the Jews of Newport. This is a collection of 50 critical primary sources that trace America's growth from the Declaration through the 1980s. It's interesting to see their choices of documents to include, and the story it tells of American history.

The American Civil Liberties Union has a vast array of materials hosted on their site. Perhaps the materials of greatest use to teachers are the frequent "news releases" about issues pertaining to our individual freedoms that are currently in the news.

The is a site that teachers should bookmark and read weekly because it keeps you up to date with the issues of the day.

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.

Transcripts of the Constitution that could be excerpted or used in entirety with classes. This website contains high resolution images and also transcripts of documents. Furthermore, it has background and history of the documents.

Thanks for this!