Examples: Human Rights Unit

Civil and Human Rights are a social science standard in California schools, and December has Human Rights Day, so I did a quick unit with grades 4-6 about this important topic. It would foreshadow discussions of inalienable rights that fifth graders would have later in the school year when studying the origins of the Revolutionary War.

I started with introducing them to the rights of children. The UN had some nice things, but even their plain text version of the Rights of the Child, had language that would not be easily understood by elementary level language learners. I did a video to help with this:

Download Video: Posted by mizmercer at TeacherTube.com.

I also asked them what rights they thought children have. Some of it was about the usual right to do whatever I want, but many had ideas about rights to education. Here is their writing:

Fourth Graders

Fifth Graders

Sixth Graders

In addition, the sixth graders starting a unit on taking a stand shortly after this. We have a large Hmong immigrant population, so I shared a local story about how recent changes in immigration rules could bar some from immigration or citizenship because they might be considered terrorists. Here is what they wrote about that.

All of these activities involved reading, writing, and higher level thinking.

Examples: Exploring Ideas

Open Court, the language arts program in my district, uses a construct to tie together ideas from reading selections in a unit called the Concept and Question board. Mathew Needleman describes this as a “second cousin twice removed” to the K-W-L chart. I prefer to call it a Question and Concept because I believe questions come before ideas. You can read more from Mr. Needleman about C & Q here. I have taken these organizers to the Internet using an application called VoiceThread which combines images/video with audio commentary. Here are some that I have done with my classes:

Third Grade Money Unit

Third Grade Country Life Unit

Fifth Grade Revolutionary War Unit (Making a New Nation)

Sixth Grade Music Unit (Beyond the Notes)

Professional Skills – 2008

My goal in this school year has been to take our school’s computer lab to the next level. Here is a video I did about what happened in lab in the first half of the school year…
Download Video: Posted by mizmercer at TeacherTube.com.