Students will read President Madison's War Message (in either an edited/annotated or full-text version) and be given the opportunity to raise questions about its contents.

Before the birth of opposition political parties, divisions among U.S. leaders developed over the ratification of the Constitution.

Many accounts portray Harrison's image as manufactured and Van Buren's image also open to criticism and ridicule. This lesson offers students the opportunity to reflect on the nature of the candidates in 1840. Though intended for the teacher, all or part of the following background information may be useful for some students.

This lesson examines the ways in which Great Britain and France countries challenged American neutrality during the Thomas Jefferson administration.

What arguments were offered in support of the Sedition Act? Washington's favorable attitude toward the Sedition Act illustrates that reasonable men in 1798 could support what most modern Americans would regard as an unjust law.

This lesson plan will explore Abraham Lincoln's rise to political prominence during the debate over the future of American slavery.

Students will build speaking and listening skills through discussion, develop fluency and literary understanding, and will build skills in written expression.This resource supports English language development for English Language Learners. This is a full lesson plan focusing on the poem "I'm Nobody." The plan includes activities in all language domains with multiple opportunities for student interaction.

This article highlights lessons and activities for elementary students about the people and cultures of the Arctic region.

This article highlights lessons and activities for elementary students about heat, insulation, and how animals and people stay warm in cold environments.

In this activity, Spanish language students will write to tourism bureaus in Costa Rica for information about Costa Rica. First, they must research online for locations, destinations and contact information. Then, students compare and contrast business letters in Spanish and English. The writing process includes pre-writing, drafts, peer review and publication. Language structures utilized are questions, present tense and the conditional tense. Included are cultural extensions and peer review templates.

The following series of activities for the classroom allow students to explore and interact with poetry by writing letters to poets.

In this lesson, students will use the individual experience of Mary McLeod Bethune to analyze choice, its affects on social equality, and impact on their own life experiences.

In this lesson students examine how imagery is used to represent ideas, themes, periods of history, and make cultural connections to poem, "Still I Rise." Students will reflect through written expression how resiliency is in their lives, school, and community.

This lesson encourages students' natural curiosity about spiders and builds on their prior knowledge. After a shared reading of Diary of a Spider by Doreen Cronin, students work cooperatively using a strategy called Fact–"Faction"–Fiction to identify what they know, gather information, and create their own multimedia diaries using PowerPoint. Although the topic example used here is spiders, this lesson is easily adaptable to any content area topic.

This lesson traces the long history of how African Americans have used music as a vehicle for communicating beliefs, aspirations, observations, joys, despair, resistance, and more across U.S. history.

Students work together to analyze an orally presented research study and provide a brief presentation on their findings to their classmates. This resource supports English language development for English language learners.

This writing assessment can be used within an informational, research-based unit. Students will spend time, in class, reading myths based on natural disasters and researching a natural disaster. Students will create their own, original myth based on their independent research.

This lesson plan uses graphic organizers to help students create podcasts/ radio broadcasts using a Natural Inquirer article.

This four-week unit focuses on the theme of nostalgia. Students will study several genres of literature (poetry, nonfiction, fiction) and write informal and formal analytical commentaries. Students will also do writing about their own childhood memories.

This resource contains an opinion writing graphic organizer, along with first draft and final writing paper.