Domestic and Foreign Problems - Mount Vernon Magazine – Presiding in a Crisis

The informational texts from the Mt. Vernon association provide a plethora of information on major historical leaders like Washington, Jefferson, and Hamilton. The Lexile level of this text is right around 1000L. This is right in the range of 7th-8th grade, making it a perfect text for students to pull information from without being too challenging. Students will likely draw connections between problems faced by early American leaders and present day American leaders. Students will be examining economic, social, and foreign policies that were being enacted during this period in American History. Students will be able to apply information from these texts into other inquiry-based engagements.

The Be Washington experience is the perfect accessible text for young adolescents. Not only does this text have multiple means of representation with audio, visual, and physical text, but also an inquiry-based design that allows students to make decisions like George Washington. Students will be abla to combine information from other texts and studies of other American leaders of the time period to decide how to act during major domestic conflicts like the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. The vocabulary students may be unfamiliar with is the Old English way of talking displayed in the videos. However, this resource supplements with multiple informational pause points that help to clear up any confusions students may have.

Whiskey Rebellion - The Whiskey Rebellion (youtube.com)

The purpose of these texts is to give students an idea of George Washington's policy implementation during his time as president. The information will be available visually for students. This, along with primary source pictures and documents shown in the video, will allow students to draw connections between the factors of civic leadership and the relation to contemporary and historical people. The vocabulary terms in these videos is a little complex, however, there are limited words shown, so students will be taking in the visuals and primary sources as opposed to physical text.

(Factors that Influence American Civic Leadership)

Grade: 7th

Standards:      

• SS.CV.5.6-8.MdC. Analyze the purposes, implementation, and consequences of public policies in historic and contemporary settings.

• SS.EC.1.6-8.LC. Explain how economic decisions affect the well-being of individuals, businesses and society.

  
  

Main Ideas:

• What does effective leadership look like? - Students will be able to identify and describe leadership qualities from the text. (ex: perseverance, courage, adaptability, confidence, accountability, etc.)

• What makes a leader? - Students will utilize these texts and decide whether or not major American people from the past and present are leaders. (Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Biden, Trump, etc. )

• How do we assess leaders? - There are multiple factors that go into how we assess leaders (character, policies, personal beliefs, etc.). Students will use the texts to support their response.