Next year, for Dawson's 10th grade year, he will be studying Current Events and American Government. With the presidential election in November, these topics will be soooo relevant!
Sadly, I do not know near as much about the election process as I should. I have never understood why we don't just count each person's vote and the candidate with the most votes wins. What the heck is the Iowa Caucus, and electoral votes .... huh???
Several months ago I came across C-SPAN Classroom. It all started with a forwarded e-mail about requesting a free electoral college map poster. YOU CAN STILL GET YOUR COPY BY CLICKING HERE! The website has constitutional clips, lesson plans, and so much more.
It sparked my interest about teaching Current Events even more when I went to the site and realized that there is a companion website called C-SPAN Classroom Deliberations that "engages students in classroom deliberations about current issues being debated in Congress." For instance, a current issue is "Should students support or oppose the 'Occupy' movement?" For this topic there is a Lesson Plan, Vocabulary Preview, notetaking handouts, and activities. I just think this will be an informative and fun way to go through American current events.
I highly encourage you to visit these highly informative, and did I mention FREE websites, for all of your Current Events lesson plans.
Thank you for posting about these resources. They look wonderful!
ReplyDeleteCSpan has great resources, don't they??
ReplyDeleteWe are plugging away on our 50 States notebook, and this semester my oldest is taking a Constitution class in co op.
Thanks for the CSpan reminder, Nicole!