In this lesson, students work as archivists at the National Archives to place historical artifacts into appropriate collections. Student will study primary sources related to our shared American heritage, analyze a variety of primary sources including visuals, text, and audio archives, and create a display showcasing one artifact and how it helps to unite us as Americans.

This resource contains information about the anti-federalist papers and contains a list anti-federalist authors.

In this interactive online activity, students will review and analyze the founding documents of the United States and understand Benjamin Franklin's contributions and connections to these founding documents. For the conclusion, students will choose the three most important documents that Franklin helped to shape, and reflect on the impact of the founding documents.

These activities enable students to explore Congress Creates the Bill of Rights wtih a mobile app for tablets and eBook from the Center for Legislative Archives. The mobile app is an interactive learning tool for tablets. The eBook presents a historic narrative focusing on James Madison's leadership role in creating the Bill of Rights. There are also six worksheets that will engage students in studying this document and questions are provided.

In this resource, students will explore the protections and limitations on authority contained in the Bill of Rights and the process by which the First Congress created it. They will do this by compiling a list of their rights as students, analyzing the Bill of Rights, and studying primary source documents to trace the origin and development of the first ten amendments. Students will then consider how the Bill of Rights might be updated to reflect 21st century circumstances.

For this activity, students learn several important facts about the Constitution and its history.

In this lesson, students analyze the preamble to the Constitution to learn some of the basic ideas about government.

In this lesson, students analyze the preamble to the Constitution to learn some of the basic ideas about government.

In this lesson, students will analyze 16 political cartoons drawn by Clifford and Jim Berryman during the early to mid-20th century. They will search through the Constitution and associate each cartoon with a specific clause. Through networking exercises, students will analyze all 16 cartoons and read the entire Constitution. They will learn about the outline and structure of the Constitution, as well as the content of many of its clauses.

Students will work on an independent project throughout their study of the Constitutional Period by researching a Constitutional topic and creating a float representing that topic. Students will then educate others on their topic by presenting their float in a class parade.

This lesson deals with events that led to the creation of a new type of government in the United States changing from the Articles of Confederation to the designing, writing, and ratification of the United States Constitution. These events created a government that had never been tried before.

This resource provides information about the Constitution of the United States, along with an image.

Students can read transcripts from the debate about the raitification of the United States Constitution by people in North Carolina.

This fifth-grade inquiry asks why countries declare their independence. As an integral early step in the process of becoming independent, a declaration of independence functions as an argument for why people should be free. This inquiry focuses on the argument made in the United States Declaration of Independence. With a firm understanding of the American colonists’ argument for independence, the inquiry shifts to students conducting research on declarations of independence in other parts of the Western Hemisphere.

Students read and discuss the Founding Fathers of our country indulgence in gripe sessions. In fact, a list of grievances comprises the longest section of the Declaration of Independence; however, the source of the document's power is its firm philosophic foundation. You can capitalize on the inclination of your students to complain to increase student awareness of the precedents behind the Declaration of Independence. Students will summarize the contributions of the "Founding Fathers" to the development of our county as well as explain how key historical figures exemplified values of American democracy.

This lesson precedes students’ exploration of the US Constitution and gives them a foundation for their study of it. Students begin by discussing some trivia related to the Constitution and then, through Jigsaw grouping, read and summarize three documents that share basic principles with it. Once they have shared and discussed the connections among the three documents, they consider how democratic ideals are addressed in the documents, the Constitution, and everyday life. This lesson was developed by NCDPI as part of the Academically and/or Intellectually Gifted Instructional Resources Project. This lesson plan has been vetted at the state level for standards alignment, AIG focus, and content accuracy.

In this lesson, students learn about the distribution of powers called federalism and explore historical and current issues in the evolution and development of federalism.

This resource contains 85 essays that were written and published during the years of 1787 and1788 in several New York newspapers to ratify the proposed constitution.

Students will explore the Revolutionary period through the choices made by the Second Continental Congress. Students will participate in an activity in which they assume the role of a Congressional member in the year 1775 and devise a plan for America after the onset of war.

In this lesson, explore the political, economic, and social factors that influenced the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the importance of this document. They look at the events of the American Revolution, and look forward to elements that should be included in the new government in order to assure that the grievances in the Declaration of Independence are addressed.