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PBS LearningMedia for teachers offers learning materials for all grades from pre-K to 12th grade. This site has a collection of interactive lessons and videos that discuss cultural awareness and diversity. This site also offers professional development materials for educators.

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PBS LearningMedia | Teaching Resources For Students And Teachers

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Inspire your students with thousands of free teaching resources including videos, lesson plans, and games aligned to state and national standards.

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Middle school and high school teachers can use the lesson plan on Global Climate Change to teach students about about STEM and civic engagement. Using thermometers, jars, a wet paper towel and sunlight, students will be able to learn about the greenhouse effect. This lesson offers students a hands-on experience to help understand Greenhouse Gases.

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Global Climate Change: Understanding the Greenhouse Effect | PBS LearningMedia

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Students study past climate change, explore the effect of greenhouse gases on Earth’s atmosphere today, and consider human impact on Earth’s climate.

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Class Dojo not only offers communication between parents and schools, but also offers social-emotional activities and lessons for educators for free. Teachers can discuss topics like empathy, gratitude, respect and more with their students.

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Start classroom discussions about brain-expanding topics like growth mindset, empathy, and more.

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Students can sometimes struggle with overcoming challenges. Using this tool, teachers can show videos of Mojo to help students talk through ways Mojo can overcome challenges. Teachers can have open discussions about how students can overcome their own challenges.

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Mojo's feeling overwhelmed and it's keeping him from having fun with his friends. This three-episode series demonstrates how students can take small steps to take on big challenges.

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Facing History and Ourselves offers educators with recourses for teaching about historical events through different lenses. This organization also offers unit plans and professional development opportunities for teachers.

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"I believe in the power of Facing History."

-Durias D., Facing History Alum

"I went to a Facing History workshop and it opened my eyes."

-Tareeq R., Educator

Facing History & Ourselves
uses lessons of history
to challenge teachers
and their students
to stand up to bigotry and hate.

Facing History & Ourselves is more than our name. It is an active and continuous process that calls on each of us to connect the choices of the past to those we face today. To build a more just and equitable future, we must face our history in all its complexity, Are you ready to face history with us?

Learn how you can experience Facing History

Facing History has thousands of research-based resources and professional learning events to support Social Studies and English Language Arts education.

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And hopefully, they will always remember what happened to us and make sure that it won't happen again.

Sonia Weitz, Holocaust survivor and poet

Sign up to download the PDF version of our textbook, Holocaust and Human Behavior.

Facing History students are 94% more likely than their peers to report that their class motivated them to learn.

92% of Facing History teachers agree that Facing History helps their students stand up for what they believe even when others disagree.

91% of elective teachers agree or strongly agree that their Facing History course promoted their students' abilities to ground reading, writing, and speaking in evidence from text.

Demand for our work is greater than ever. Make a 100% tax-deductible donation today and you'll help us reach even more teachers and students around the world, giving them the tools to stand up to bigotry and hate.

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Facing History & Ourselves uses lessons of history to challenge teachers and their students to stand up to bigotry and hate.

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Neighborhood Good is an interactive game available on iCivics. Educators can use this game to further extend student understanding of civic engagements and building communities. This game is great for students in grades K-12. The game also offers features like auditory assistance and is available in Spanish.

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Identify a problem in the community

Gather information about the problem, the impacts, and possible solutions

Use information gathered from listening to people in the community to make a plan to address a problem

Identify elements of a plan that can contribute to an impactful outcome

Welcome to the neighborhood! We've got a lot of great people and more than a few challenges. Can your students devise solutions that reflect the community's needs and resources?

Challenge your students to solve familiar problems and discover how they can impact their community by playing Neighborhood Good. Students will select issues within a fictional community that resonates with them, speak with neighbors to better understand the issue, and develop a plan of action. Students can address three different challenges or revisit a challenge to try different solutions.

Show your students how civic engagement works as they discover the level of impact they can make.

Teacher Tips

The Neighborhood Good Extension Pack includes activities and a mini quiz that give the game context and reinforce and assess its concepts. Extension Packs include a downloadable teacher lesson plan, assignable student handout, and instructive Google Slides. Google Slides can be used on projectors or interactive whiteboards.

Multilingual and English learners ( ELs/MLs) and Spanish-speaking students: This game offers a decision-support tool, an English voiceover, a contextualized glossary, and a Spanish-language version.

Our games integrate seamlessly into your curriculum and classroom! Learn more about how to teach with games.
This material is based upon work supported by the National Defense Education Program (NDEP) for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education, Outreach, and Workforce Initiative Programs under Grant No. HQ0034-21-S-F001. The views expressed in written materials or publications, and/or made by speakers, moderators, and presenters, do not necessarily reflect the official policies of the Department of Defense nor does mention of trade names, commercial practices, or organizations imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.

Create your free iCivics account and discover standards aligned lessons and games that meet all of your instructional needs. Our nonpartisan classroom resources engage students with complex concepts in ways they can understand and relate to.

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Whether you enjoy finding opportunities within a well-structured sequence of resources or prefer looking around for pieces and bits that can be jigsawed together, our Scope & Sequence documents are a perfect reference point for planning. Scope & Sequence documents are available for elementary, middle, and high school classrooms and list all of our resources in one place.

View the Scope & Sequence

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Welcome to the neighborhood! We've got a lot of great people and more than a few challenges. Can you come up with solutions that reflect the community's needs and resources? In Neighborhood Good, you will select the issues that resonate with you, speak with community members to better understand the issue, and develop a plan of action.

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Learning for Justice is a website that offers free k-12 lesson plans, learning standards, and professional development materials. These tools are centered around diversity, equity, justice, and creating an inclusive classroom.

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Learning for Justice is a community education program of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) that centers civic and political action education for everyone.

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Learning for Justice - Digital Footprint Activity

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Learning for Justice - Digital Footprint Activity

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Educators can use this lesson to teach their students about the importance of safety within the online communities they are part of. Learning for Justice offers lesson objectives, standards, activities and handouts for educators to use during the lessons. With this lesson, Educators can simulate participation in an online community through the role playing activities in the lesson.

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Vocabulary

community [kuh myoo nih tee] ( noun) a group of people who share something in common

inclusive [in cloo siv] ( adjective) welcoming to all kinds of people

empathy [ ehm puh thee] ( noun) the ability to understand other people's feelings and sometimes feel alongside them

Series Overview

As technology advances and the social landscape shifts, it is crucial for students to become digitally literate citizens. In this series, elementary students will learn the ins and outs of media literacy, from choosing reliable sources and understanding online searches to navigating online security and participating in digital communities.

Lesson Overview

This lesson aims to help students learn to safely and respectfully participate in different kinds of digital communities. Students will listen to or read a story about what it means to use empathy and promote inclusivity as a member of a community. They will then translate these values and strategies to an online environment.

Students will also have a chance to role-play appropriate ways to identify and respond to bias and hate within a community. They will think about the particular challenges that might come up when these issues arise in an online environment.

Procedure

Being Inclusive and Showing Empathy in Communities

1. Ask your students, "What is a community?" Then ask, "What communities do you belong to?" Write their ideas down so everyone can see. Focusing on one of the communities listed, ask "What are things we need in a community to feel safe?" List students' ideas about the characteristics that make a community safe. Help students to think not just about physical safety but also about the things that help them feel safe emotionally.

2. Explain to your students that today you will be thinking about how to be inclusive and show empathy in communities. Ask them what they think of when they hear those terms, and chart their responses. Come up with working definitions of each word.

If the terms empathy and inclusive are unfamiliar to students, you will want to slow down this portion of the lesson. Choose to focus on one of the two concepts, and start with an example from your own classroom. Tell students about a time you saw them work to make others feel included or cared for, and use this to help them understand and tease out the definition of the concept you are discussing.

3. Have students read the story "Being a Friend Online." (Note: As an alternative, if you have a favorite short story or picture book about community, you can use that instead. As long as it gets at the themes of being inclusive and showing empathy, it does not matter whether it explicitly addresses digital participation for this portion of the lesson.) For students who struggle with reading, you can read the story aloud or pair them with partners who can read to them. Students can read independently or with partners. Once they are finished reading the story, bring them together to discuss the following questions, along with any other ideas that came up.

When were the characters being inclusive?

How did the characters show empathy in this story?

What experiences of your own does this story remind you of?

What does it mean for kids your age to develop communities?

What are some of the challenges and responsibilities that come with being part of a community?

What Are Digital Communities?

1. Now, your students are ready to think about some of the characteristics that make digital communities specific. First, using "Being a Friend Online"-or another story you chose-as a jumping off point, ask your students to name all of the different online communities they have ever heard of. Chart all of their responses, and make sure students help each other understand what each of these communities actually is. Some of your students may not have heard of online communities, and some likely will have. To bridge this gap, limit the number of responses you put on the chart and make sure to offer clear, succinct and accurate information about what each community is. Give students with less digital exposure a chance to list communities they know about or participate in, such as a soccer team, a neighborhood group, etc.

2. Ask students to work independently to create a list of three to five unique challenges they think might come up when participating in online communities. For example, it can be hard to communicate emotions or intent when you are not face to face; people might feel freer to say rude things when they are anonymous and spelling, grammar, and ability to type can get in the way of behaving how you want to in a community.

Then, have students pair up to share their challenges and brainstorm guidelines that might help them address these challenges. (Note: For students who are less familiar with online communities, you can ask them to list challenges associated with being part of a community in general.) When you bring students back together, ask them to speculate about whether these challenges would be the same or different in a real-world environment.

When People Are Not Inclusive and Don't Show Empathy

1. Break students up into five small groups and give each group one of the role-play situations included in the "Digital Community Role-play Scenarios" handout. Ask them to discuss the role-play situation and then act out what they feel is the best solution to the problem. Then, bring your class together and allow each group to share their role-play and the solution they came up with. Leave time for discussion, and emphasize the complexity of these situations to your students.

Do Something

Would your school benefit from a set of guidelines for participation in digital communities? Who better to create this than your students? Ask them to form working groups to brainstorm sets of rules that might guide participation with empathy and inclusivity. Facilitate research into guidelines that other schools have created. When you have a list of rules or guidelines, plan an assembly where your students can share these with other classes and teachers in your school.
Alignment to Common Core State Standards CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.4.2
Determine a theme of a story, drama, or poem from details in the text; summarize the text.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.4
Determine the meaning of general academic and domain-specific words or phrases in a text relevant to a grade 4 topic or subject area.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.4.7
Interpret information presented visually, orally, or quantitatively (e.g., in charts, graphs, diagrams, time lines, animations, or interactive elements on Web pages) and explain how the information contributes to an understanding of the text in which it appears.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.4.1.a
Come to discussions prepared, having read or studied required material; explicitly draw on that preparation and other information known about the topic to explore ideas under discussion.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.SL.4.1.b
Follow agreed-upon rules for discussions and carry out assigned roles.

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This lesson aims to help students learn to safely and respectfully participate in different kinds of digital communities.

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Facing History & Ourselves - First Day of School Activity

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Facing History & Ourselves - First Day of School Activity

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The first week of school is important when setting the tone in a classroom. Educators can use Concentric Circles to learn about their classmates during the first week. This lesson is great for understanding student goals and desires for the school year early on. This activity can also be paired with a reading or video to get insight on student thinking.

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This kinesthetic discussion activity invites students to be active listeners and speakers and to interact with a wide range of classmates.

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iCivics is a website that offers educators free resources on civic education. iCivics offers learning through lesson plans for teachers and interactive games for students. These resources help students understand topics like democracy, government, and civic responsibility.

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Released at the Civic Learning Week National Forum in Washington, D.C., new research shows the need to provide more robust civic learning opportunities in high school, the positive effects of students openly discussing civic and political issues, the effect of legislation on teachers and students, and the need for more civic role models.

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Home - Advancing Civic Education for the Future of U.S. - iCivics

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iCivics is dedicated to advancing civic learning so young people have the confidence to shape the world around them and believe in our country's future.