Birthdays are a way to make a personal connection.  This enhances focus and engagement that helps students make positive connections culturally to other lives.  It uses Social Studies goals of learning about lifestyles, beliefs, ideas, and the influence that these have had on our world.  The EXCEL document has a list of 12 months of birthdays of African Americans.  This will give them access to any day of the year and a birthday to choose and look up to read about.  

Containing more than 50 articles from the award-winning Tar Heel Junior Historian magazine and over 40 lesson plans, this multidisciplinary Educator Notebook will enrich your exploration of North Carolina and American history with diverse perspectives. This resource's link takes you to a very short form that gives you free downloadable access to the complete PDF book.

In this classroom activity, students will identify the purpose and goals of education in American society and explain why African Americans chose to challenge segregated education in their quest for equality. This lesson is part of the online exhibition entitled Separate is Not Equal: Brown v. Board of Education.

Students can learn about how people with a Hispanic background have been represented on stamps over the history of the United States. This is a resource from the Smithsonian Postal Museum and it addresses the culture of the United States.

This lesson investigates where and why the English colonists settled in America. The lesson also looks at leaders who had an impact on the development of the colonies and their reasons for founding the colonies.

In this unit, students explore Colonial America through the building of timelines and investigating primary and secondary sources. This study of significant events in the colonization of North America and the aspects of everyday life in Colonial America is designed for students to gather, record, and organize their own Colonial Notebook. Students will take on the role of colonist in a given region and work with other 'colonists' of the same region to develop a report and presentation. The study will take students through the life and times of those early settlers and will have them preparing a colonial meal representative of their region of focus

In this lesson, students will review primary sources to learn about the popular response to the airplane during the early 1900s. They will use their primary source study to understand how people felt about this new technology. Then, they will choose a technological invention of today and document the popular response to that invention.

In this resource, students can learn about the impact of fishing and fishing communities through out the United States. This site is connected with the Smithsonian Museum.

Students will learn abouth te Freemen's Colony which was established by Union soldiers during the American Civil War.

Students will listen to some freedom songs on the Internet, and then make their own version of one of the songs.

In these units, students can discover the Spanish and Mexican roots of American cowboy culture in this set of four lessons, divided into grades K–2, 3–5, 6–8, and 9–12. The youngest students look for the Spanish origins of cowboy words (lasso from lazo, for example). Older students do a bit of translation work: they compose a rhyming cowboy ballad based on a Mexican corrido.

In this lesson, students will listen to a read aloud book called Coming to America by Betsy Maestro. The class will discuss why the people in the story decided to immigrate to the United States and how they acclimated themselves within the culture. In groups of four, students will take a virtual field trip to Ellis Island. They will compare and contrast immigration from a long time ago to the present. The teacher will assess student achievement by having students fill in the last portion of the Know, Want to Know, and Learned chart (see attachment). In addition, the students will write a summative paper that includes a reflection on what the students learned throughout the unit using a “Summative Reflection Rubric” (see attachment). This lesson was developed by Cheryl Riffe as part of their completion of the North Carolina Global Educator Digital Badge program. This lesson plan has been vetted at the local and state level for standards alignment, Global Education focus, and content accuracy.

In the previous unit, students learned about European exploration and colonization in the Western Hemisphere. Students were introduced to the English colonial regions (New England, Middle and Southern colonies) and reasons for coming to the New World. This lesson investigates where and why the English colonists settled in America. The lesson also looks at leaders who had an impact on the development of the colonies and their reasons for founding the colonies.

In this lesson, students learn about the political, economic, and geographic regional differences that led to conflict in the United States through map sketches, primary sources, problem-solving and points of view.

In this lesson, students work in small groups to organize a wagon train for a trek westward. They determine leadership responsibilities and rules needed to make a successful trek.

In this lesson, students write a persuasive letter home defending their decision either to settle in Utah and farm the land, or to go on to California to seek gold.

In this lesson, students will use primary source materials to investigate significant events in American History of the 19th century.

In this lesson, students will use primary source materials to investigate the economy, physical geography, and cultural aspects of the Northern States and the Southern States prior to the Civil War.

Students analyze the seal of the city of New York, use maps, and read and discuss a passage to understand how trade connected Native Americans and Dutch sailors in early New Amsterdam.

Students will investigate patterns in immigration through data
tables and data maps. They can also develop their own graphs to view the information in
other ways.