The 14th Amendment granted citizenship and equal civil and legal rights to African-Americans and slaves who had been emancipated after the American Civil War. This simple overview of the 14th Amendment and Brown vs Board of Education would be appropriate for elementary students. It does have short advertisements.
This short videoblog with Kenneth C. Davis sparks interest in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution by discussing the Loving case for interracial marriage.
This site is all annotated primary documents from around the world. There are some really interesting things to explore. It would be a fun way to introduce students to primary sources. It also might provide some interesting things to show students to enhance your teaching.
This site would be useful for high school students exploring the rights of felons to vote. It compares different state laws. The sidebar options would help set up students to debate the issue.
Rock the Vote, a movement to encourage young people to vote, provides a wealth of resources, in young person friendly language, about the importance of voting and how to register.
This is a great site for younger students to gain some knowledge about voting rights in this country. Its very easy to navigate, kid friendly and presents brief amounts of text on each page. 3rd-5th graders would find this a helpful introduction to voting rights.
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.
These created lessons span K-12. They are all slideshow based and text heavy, but some of the interactives and the links are neat. They could be helpful in developing an introduction to a constitution unit.
Here is a link to the video of the School House Rock Preamble song. In fifth grade, I had to memorize the preamble and this was really helpful. Even those these videos are old and a little cheesy, I've found elementary students love them.
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.
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.
This includes the full text of David Walker's famous anti-slavery pamphlet "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World" and history about David Walker. This may be particularly significant to our students as David Walker was from Boston, Massachusetts.
Exploring the Digital Vaults is easy. You can browse through the hundreds of photographs, documents, and film clips and discover the connection between some of the National Archives' most treasured records.
This is a fun way to have students explore historical documents and really just stumble upon treasures.
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.