About This Lesson
This lesson is a great opening activity for the first weeks of school. It will facilitate a discussion of essential questions related to equality. This helps you get to know your students, and it primes them to think about these issues throughout your social studies class. You can bring it full circle by ending the year with a reflection on the things they thought way back in September.
The presentation below will take you through three essential questions. Each slide has a main essential question, some follow up questions, and some pictures to prompt ideas. A good bell ringer assignment is to do a Think-Pair-Share, where your students talk about one of the questions.
For some suggestions on how best to use this presentation and facilitate this discussion, read this. The key questions are - are all Americans treated equally, who has the power to change things, and how do they change things.
The lesson includes a writing activity to close things out and assess what your students learned. This could be an exit ticket they submit on the way out, or it could be a homework assignment.
While you can use this activity by itself, it works best when you incorporate it with a thematic approach to the curriculum. You can combine the essential questions about equality with those about other themes: economics, civics, movement of people, and conflict. By doing so, you'll help your students draw connections between different topics and epochs, and they'll have a deeper understanding of the content you're trying to teach them.
