Study Guides and Lesson Plans for
Teaching American History
Hands-on History: American History Activities (Hands-On History Activities)
Making learning fun and interactive is a surefire way to excite your social studies students. This book includes game-formatted activities for major historical topics. While the goal of these activities is to create excitement and to spark interest in further study, they are also standards based and include grading rubrics and ideas for assessment. Encouraging teamwork, creativity, intelligent reflection, and decision making, the games of Hands-on History Activities will help you take an active approach to teaching while inspiring your students to make their own explorations of history. 192pp.
Great Colonial America Projects: You Can Build Yourself (Build It Yourself)
Great Colonial America Projects You Can Build Yourself introduces readers ages 9–12 to colonial America through hands-on building projects. From dyeing and spinning yarn to weaving cloth, from creating tin plates and lanterns to learning wattle and daub construction. Great Colonial America Projects You Can Build Yourself gives readers a chance to experience how colonial Americans lived, cooked, entertained themselves, and interacted with their neighbors.
The American Revolution for Kids
Heroes, traitors, and great thinkers come to life in this activity book, and the
concepts of freedom and democracy are celebrated in true accounts of the officers,
delegates, riflemen, and hardworking farm wives and children who created the new nation.
This collection tells the story of the Revolution, from the Stamp Act and the Boston Tea
Party to the British surrender at Yorktown and the creation of the United States
Constitution. All American students are required to study the Revolution and the
Constitution, and these 21 activities make it fun and memorable. Kids create a fringed
hunting shirt and a tricorn hat and reenact the Battle of Cowpens. They learn how to make
their voices heard in "I Protest" and how Congress works in "There Ought to
Be a Law." A final selection including the Declaration of Independence, a glossary,
biographies, and pertinent Web sites makes this book a valuable resource for both students
and teachers. 160 pages.
Also see:
Also see Newbery Winning Books about the American Revolution:
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Far Away and Long Ago - Young Historians in the Classroom
Make your history teaching more meaningful to your students and more rewarding to
yourself. Book includes:
 | an overview of current issues regarding history in the elementary school |
| curriculum units ranging from the near to the far, from the recent to the distant past,
including topics such as memoir, immigration, Native Americans, and the Pilgrims |
| detailed descriptions on how each unit was developed, taught, and assessed |
| suggestions on how to experiment with ways of telling history: writing personal
histories, creating picture books, producing research reports, staging performances.
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| examples and analysis of student work, so as examining immigration from the
perspective of a recent arrival from the Caribbean or from a Pilgrim hundreds of years ago
makes history real and compelling to these young historians. |
| teaching goals and reflections on the complexities of teaching history today |
Woven throughout this personal narrative are practical suggestions written by
co-author, Stephanie Fins, a museum educator, who collaborated with Monica as she
developed and taught her history curriculum. Stephanie provides a rich variety of
practical teaching suggestions, topic extensions, and professional resources:
| Zooming In: informational essays on topics that support the historical content. |
| Booktalks: reviews of relevant professional books. |
| Tools of the Trade: practical ideas to support and extend classroom work.
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| On-Line Resources: related Internet sites that offer text, images, audio material, and
"virtual" tours of historic sites. |
Far Away and Long Ago will expand the ways teachers think about history and provide
elementary and middle school practitioners with new ways to teach this lively subject.
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Posters for the American History Classroom
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