National Council for the Social Studies
Analyzing a Product or Political Advertisement
How do advertisements evoke specific thoughts and feelings? Class members find out through the exploration of the Internet, videos, television, magazines, radio, and posters. Learners investigate commercial advertisements, political...
Compton Unified School District
How Can We Locate Places?
How can we locate places? Maps, of course! Expose second graders to the tools available in maps and discuss how these tools can help people find locations. Students also look at communities, including what makes a community and the...
Curated OER
Word Art with King's Words
Students investigate equality and racism by creating a word art project. In this civil rights activity, students discover the life of Martin Luther King Jr. and create a word art project using the Internet site Wordle Web. ...
Curated OER
The Power of Words Words That Reinforce Stereotypes
Students devise and discuss definitions for words that are promote stereotypes. They share the definitions and impressions in small groups.
US Institute of Peace
Defining Conflict
Conflict is everywhere—but is it avoidable? The first activity in a series of 15 peacebuilding lessons examines the nature of conflict at home, school, and across the world. Learners develop a definition of conflict through group work...
Curated OER
Social Studies Wonders: An Exploration
Help middle schoolers conduct Internet research and develop a working definition for the discipline of social studies. From a list of websites, they develop classification skills and differentiate between primary and secondary sources....
Curated OER
Map Studies
Students study maps and use web based activities to develop their mapping skills. In this mapping skills lesson, students use the internet to define cartography they make a list of information regarding a typical road map and explain the...
Curated OER
Philanthropy in Literature Lesson 1: Definition of Terms
Students watch a video after which they define philanthropy and site examples of it in daily life. They use this definition as they work through the rest of the unit.
Curated OER
What Is War?
What kinds of human activity do we define as "warlike"? Middle and high schoolers examine various definitions of war and types of warfare, especially as these descriptions relate to the kinds of war we are witnessing at the beginning of...
Curated OER
Life in Dorset
Students investigate a city in England by analyzing images on the web. In this listening comprehension lesson, students practice remembering details after hearing an audio tape about a city in England called Dorset. Students discuss what...
Curated OER
Who Said It First? Scavenger Hunt
In this original languages worksheet, students utilize the Internet to access one specific website to find the original languages for eight unique words. Students draw a line from each word in column one to its original language in...
Curated OER
200 Greatest Pop Culture Icons
Students discuss style and characteristics of musical time periods as well as the definition of "pop culture." They compare and contrast modern-day popular icons to music icons throughout history. This activity requires a video,...
Curated OER
"What is an American?"
Eleventh graders ponder about what it means to be an "American." They discuss the impact of an author's word choice and sentence structure on text. They identify some major themes and development of the Letters... Compose paragraphs and...
Curated OER
Philanthropy in Literature
Students define the term philanthropy and find examples of it in everyday life. In this philanthropy lesson, students try to define philanthropy and illustrate it. Students then work in groups to define the term and create a web for the...
Curated OER
Coastal Landforms
Students explore landforms. Using the internet, students research the main landforms. They define landforms and download images into a word document. Students create their own picture-dictionary.
Curated OER
Endeavor: Preparing Ourselves for Future Destinations
Middle schoolers define the word endeavor and then practice the art of self-discipline. They create character trait charts and discuss how strong character traits help students meet their future destinations.
Bully Free Systems
Bully Free Lesson Plans—Seventh Grade
Having a hard time defining bullying with your seventh graders? Discuss the different types of behavior one would see in a bullying situation with a series of lessons, worksheets, and group activities.
Curated OER
Class and Health: You Are What You Eat
Students determine a working definition of class in order to determine how social class can affect personal health. They research their own nutritional needs and work to encourage healthy change in their communities.
Curated OER
Symbols
Students, using their definition of symbols, divide into groups and create a symbol that represents the diversity in their group. They identify familiar symbols and express the meaning of them.
Curated OER
Deforestation in the Amazon Rain Forest
Learners investigate deforestation. In this Amazon Rain Forest lesson, students discover what deforestation is as they listen to a lecture, read and discuss an article, and define the vocabulary words on the provided list.
Curated OER
Character Education: Perseverance
Students analyze and define the word perseverance as it applies to Martin Luther King, Jr. In this Martin Luther King, Jr. lesson plan, students discuss the book 'I Have a Dream: The Story of Martin Luther King.' Students analyze the...
Curated OER
Extreme Weather!
Middle schoolers create a web page explaining a specfic type of extreme weather and identify recent examples of the weather occurance. They form small groups to research the weather type and build an HTML word document to share with...
Curated OER
Endangered Species
Students explore the various reasons for animals becoming endangered and threatened with extinction. Within this lesson plan, students choose an animal to research and then creativity introduce their animal to the rest of the class...
Curated OER
Halloween
In this Halloween instructional activity, students fill in the blanks to sentences with words matching Halloween pictures and then label the pictures with the number of sentence it goes with. Students complete 2 activities.