Lesson Plans
We focus our lesson plans on topics of American history that are vital to understanding our past but are often not taught or not taught in-depth in American school systems. We hope our lesson plans can be a resource to teachers looking to move away from the whitewashed curriculum standard, or to students curious to learn more about their history. We are still in the process of writing and editing lesson plans and are adding new ones each week.
All our lesson plans are written for a middle-school reading level, about 6th-7th grade. They have been written by high-school juniors and seniors and edited by high schoolers and middle-school teachers.
We are aware that historical lesson plans for many events that we cover are available online by organizations that advocate for a specific group of people. Often, we will provide a resource for further research if a teacher wishes to cover a specific resource with a more in-depth curriculum. We are delighted at the wide availability of lesson plans, but we believe our lessons are unique in three ways.
1. They are written by students for students. As high schoolers, we have recently been through middle school and understand how middle-schoolers learn and what they pay attention to. We hope to engage them through our lesson plans.
2. Ours are short but detailed. Before starting this organization, we researched other lesson plans. Many of them tend to be around 10 pages, with long sections of text and multiple activities. While we deeply wish that every topic could be covered so deeply and expertly, we recognize that many middle-school curriculums are strict and teachers cannot possibly cover all these topics in-depth, particularly if none of these topics are already in their curriculum. With the shorter length of our lesson plans, we hope to eliminate the time issue. Our lesson plans are around 30 minutes long, with videos and resources if the teacher wants students to explore further.
3. They are all on one website with a consistent style. Most curriculums that aim to cover topics that American history usually ignores or covers incorrectly come from a specific organization. Instead of searching the whole internet, our organization aims to provide a consistent type of lesson plan.
To align with this, each one includes:
- initial context and discussion
- key terms
- main points are written in a narrative format and separated with headings
- final discussion questions
- cited and reliable sources
In the future, we hope to expand to legislation for the American curriculum. We believe all American middle schoolers should be learning about our rich and diverse history. In our exploration of history topics, we wanted to make lesson plans that would line up with many districts requirements so that it would be easier for teachers to include our lesson plans in their curriculum. For example, most middle schools teach about World War II. During this unit, teachers could use our Najavo Code Talkers and Tuskegee Airmen lessons to emphasize the impacts of people of color during World War II.
We decided on 5 major categories that can fall into many school curriculums:
- Native American and Indigenous History
- The Constitution and Early American Wars
- African-American History
- World War II
- United States Social Movements
We also have a small series throughout our categories called "Legacy Of". These short biographies examine popular people in history, such as Martin Luther King Jr. or Christopher Columbus and examine how their public image has shifted over time and what parts of their story are unknown.
As we hope to use all of our lesson plans in a middle school classroom, we will post them individually once they have been shown to be "tried and true". As we post continue to add finalized lessons to our website, we hope teachers across the United States will find them useful.
Our lesson plans in PDF format are below. If you would like access to the Google Document to copy and edit for your students in particular, please send us a message in the "Contact Us" tab and we will get back to you in 24 hours.
