October 13th, 2007 walkere
The century after the Reformation was an extremely violent one in Europe. Protestants and Catholics completed unspeakable atrocities on each other. Wars raged for decades at a time.
The period is significant for both European History and US History. In the European context, the wars and the eventual peace (the Peace of Westphalia) created the basis of the modern state system. In the American context, religious violence and persecution encouraged many people to flee to the British and French colonies.
Check out this lesson plan on religious violence. It involves a good anticipatory set, working with some primary documents, and challenging students to write creatively. Quite a powerful lesson, overall, and students are unlikely to forget the content.
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September 21st, 2007 walkere
The first stop in my class on the way to colonization was the Spanish Empire in the Americas. Spanish holdings constitute almost half of what is now the US, so how can we understand our history if we don’t understand those that came before us?
This lesson plan is intended to be a one day introduction to the development and culture of the Spanish Empire. It is far from exhaustive, and I would love to do more with it. However, I don’t have the time in your packed curriculum to dwell on it. So if you’re looking for a short, one day overview of New Spain, read on.
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September 16th, 2007 walkere
This lesson plan is an attempt to spice up an otherwise bland section of the textbook - Central and West African Kingdoms, circa 1450. This section is intended to provide students with some background on what the world was like when Columbus sailed west and sparked the colonization of the Americas.
The lesson begins with a simple reading prompt. It is an excerpt from Gomes Eanes de Zurara that I found interesting. In discussing the discovery of Guinea, he describes Africa as being sparsely populated by nomadic peoples. He makes no reference to the large kingdoms (Benin, Songhai, etc) or to Timbuktu.
The students task, then, is to research African civilization at this time period and write a letter to the King of Portugal to convince him that de Zurara was wrong.
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September 15th, 2007 walkere
There are countless ways to write up your lesson plans. Some teachers and administrators like long, detailed lesson plans complete with an outline of information to be delivered. Others like the short and sweet one week summary, with objectives, activities, and assignments.
No matter what type of lesson plan you prefer, it will help make your life easier to have en electronic template (probably in MS Word or Excel) to begin with. This way you can type up your lesson plans, save them to your computer, and avoid making countless copies of a blank template that you got from a co-worker four years ago.
Here are two different blank templates that you might find useful.
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September 15th, 2007 walkere
There is a lot to be done in the first few days of school. Contact information needs to be collected, schedules need to be ironed out, and procedures need to be learned. It’s common to spend a few days on non-sequitor “back to school” lessons before diving into the “real” curriculum.
I developed this particular lesson plan for the second or third day back at school. I used it in a US I course, but it could be easily adapted to US II or World History. The driving concept behind the lesson is that students don’t like the idea of memorizing lots of dates, but they need to have a relative idea of when things happened. Solution? Create a short timeline (10-12 major dates) within which students can organize events they learn later.
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