Lesson Plans
Lesson One
The students will start this class by receiving the new school rules and policies (as mentioned earlier, these are not to be real). I will engage the student in a discussion on how they feel about the new rules; I will inform them there is something we can do in response to these new rules. The students will already be stationed in groups; I will give each group a rubric of what needs to be in the letter to the principle (mirroring the Declaration of Independence). In their groups the students will draft their letter to the principle, once they get a rough draft I will hand them the materials for their Declaration (as the teacher you can age the paper or have the students do it (tea bags work). Once the students have finished their final draft they will need to present their declaration to the class. After presenting the group will have to ask/ petition the class to sign their declaration (if you would like to add excitement you can make up consequences for signing/endorsing such a letter). Once all you classes have made their Declarations they can presented in the hallway or in the classroom for a visual reminder of what the Declaration of Independence was.
Lesson Two
With a solid foundation built the students will learn about the Declaration of Independence. My students are not the biggest fans of note taking, but I love lecturing and giving notes, so I meet them half way with K-W-Ls. I will have the students set up in their notebooks three sections (Know, Want to know, and learned). A power point presentation about the Declaration of Independence will be set up with a section asking them what they already know about the document. As a class we will discuss what information student's volunteer. Next the presentation moves directly into asking the student to write down what the students would like to learn (if I don't answer their questions or we don't cover what they wanted to learn they can look it up for extra credit), this is followed by another discussion with the students presenting what they want to learn. Lastly the presentation will go into the information/notes they need to know for their state standards, these will be written in the learned section. Once we finish the notes we will return to the groups from the previous class and I will give back their documents and the true version of the Declaration of Independence. The students in their group will be asked to compare and contrast the two documents. The student will see how similar their documents were to the Declaration of Independence and this should create a memory for long term recall.
Lesson Three
This lesson will start the kids off by the students coming in and answering a warm up question asking "have you heard or seen any political advertising lately, if yes what were they? If no, what is a political advertisement? I will give the students around 3 minutes to answer on their own paper before asking for volunteers. After going over the answers the students should not only be familiar with what political advertisement is they will hopefully hear some decent examples. This warm up will have the students prepared enough for the days lesson on Political commercials. I will create a graphic organizer for the kids to use to map out the facts from opinions, determining the bias, identifying the issue in the commercials, and lastly what the goal of the commercial is. As a class we will take a look at three different years of elections, from the website http://www.livingroomcandidate.org/, after looking over roughly 12 different 30-second to 1-minute commercials. After each one I will give the students a minute or two to write their thoughts down in their organizer. At the end we will go over as a class what we believe to be the facts v. opinions, the bias that were shown, and lastly issues and point the commercial was trying to drive home. Once the students turn in their graphic organizers, I will begin to introduce the student's campaign projects. At this point we will have already viewed political cartoons, the historic debate, and determined what the party platforms are.
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