Activities to Do After the Lesson

It is also important to keep students engaged with the subject matter after the lesson plan has been completed. This allows the students to learn and conceptualize the information so they retain the information. This will also aid them at test time, because it will reduce the need for “cramming” before a test.

Activity 1

An activity that students could do after a lesson is on a website called iCivics. This website gives students the opportunity to act as “Constitutional Lawyers,” determine if clients have a case, and match those clients with the right lawyers. This puts a playful spin on real-life situations where the First Amendment can be applied.

Activity 2

This activity will give students the opportunity to assess what they have learned about the first amendment and the freedom of the press by taking the practice test including specific questions and instant feedback. Click on “Chapter Five” to begin the fun!

Activity 3

The separation of church and state has been written into the US Constitution. This quiz gives students the opportunity to practice what they know about the Freedom of Religion as it is given in the First Amendment.

Activity 4

After the lesson plan has concluded, it is a good idea to have the students turn in an assignment based on what they learned. This activity gives them the opportunity to take what they know about the First Amendment rights and conceptualize that information as it pertains to them, making this topic personal.

Directions: Think about the five freedoms of the First Amendment. How can you exercise each of the rights protected in the First Amendment? In the boxes below, write two or three sentences explaining how you personally exercise this right, or create a drawing with a one sentence caption.

Freedom of Press-

Freedom of Religion-

Freedom of Assembly-

Freedom to Petition-

Freedom of Speech-

Activities to Do During the Lesson

Just as important as getting the students in your class interested in the materials, is keeping them engaged during instruction. By utilizing different teaching methods during the lesson plan, students will be engaged throughout and will learn the materials.

Activity 1

By using current (and not so current, but important) events and the First Amendment, have students explain if those events would have occurred had the First Amendment not existed. By doing this in a classroom setting, the students will be able to learn more by receiving feedback from their peers and their instructor.

Discuss as a class:

If you only had freedom of ______, would the events/ achievements below have been/be possible?

•  Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall
• The Washington Post uncovering the Watergate scandal
• Women gaining the right to vote
• An all-night prayer vigil in memory of a fallen soldier
• The creation of a Web site that details the sources of politicians’ campaign contributions

Activity 2

Each of the five freedoms given in the First Amendment is important, and they cannot exist without one another. Ask students to explain why this is, this will give students the opportunity to conceptualize and use the information that has been relayed to them during the lesson while also providing opportunities for teacher feedback.

Ask students if they think any one of these freedoms could exist alone, without the support of the other four. For example, would free speech be a powerful right if we did not also have a free press? How would freedom to petition be different if we didn’t also have freedom of assembly? Ask the students to think of more examples of how the freedoms work together

All five freedoms are linked and often intertwine with each other. But what if we had to get rid of one of our five First Amendment freedoms? Which one would they choose? Tell students you’re going to do four rounds of voting to determine which freedom the group thinks is the most important. Ask the students to decide which of the freedoms they would eliminate if they had to pick one. Then have your students show which freedoms they chose using a show of hands. After the first vote, cross out the freedom that received the most votes for elimination. Then ask some of the students who voted for that freedom to explain why they picked it. – Repeat the voting process three more times, asking the students to vote for the right they would eliminate of the ones remaining on the board. After each vote, ask some of the students who voted for the eliminated freedom why they made that choice. – After four rounds of voting, only one right will remain. Ask the students if they agree that this right is most important and why or why not. Ask them how this right would be different if it didn’t have the four other First Amendment rights to support it. Would it still be a useful right? How would people exercise it? Would people exercising this right have to do anything differently if they didn’t have the other four? Has the remaining right lost its meaning because of the elimination of the other four rights?

Activity 3

This activity gives students the opportunity to review the five freedoms given in the First Amendment during class. This activity, which is done either as a class or in small groups, gives students the opportunity to reiterate what they learned and apply it to their lives.

Tell your students you’re going to talk about the First Amendment – the law that’s written six stories tall on the front of the Newseum.

Ask the students if they can remember the five freedoms in the First Amendment. After guesses/discussion, write the five freedoms on the board and make sure your students understand what each one means: –

•  Religion – You can believe what you want, belong to any religion or no religion. –
•  Speech – You can voice your opinions using words, symbols or actions. – Press – The government cannot censor information in newspapers, online news sources, TV news broadcasts, etc. –
•  Assembly – You can gather in a group. –
• Petition – You can criticize the government, and you can complain about policies that affect you negatively and ask for change. –

 Ask students for examples of using each of these rights. Tell them to think about their own lives and what they may have seen or read in the news

Activity 4

During the lesson it is important to ask students if what they are learning pertains to them. By asking the below questions after each of these freedoms is discussed and giving the class the opportunity to come up with an answer makes this subject personal, and therefore interesting to the student.

Does this violate the First Amendment’s freedom of religion? Why or why not?

1. Your parents insist you attend church every Sunday.
2. Your private school requires you to say a certain prayer each morning, even though you have a different faith.
3. Your public school begins a sporting event with a student-led prayer over the school’s PA system.
4. Your state passes a law that everyone must pay taxes to support a specifi c church. First Amendment Freedoms: What’s a Violation?

Does this violate the First Amendment’s freedom of speech? Why or why not?

1. You work in a retail store after school and on weekends. Your boss says you have to stop talking so much while you’re working.
2. Your public school administrator suspends you for wearing a black armband in protest of a war.
3. Your public school principal says you can’t come to school as long as your hair is dyed purple.
4. You do not wish to say the Pledge of Allegiance each morning, and your principal expels you. ?

Does this violate the First Amendment’s freedom of the press? Why or why not?

1. You work in a restaurant. Your boss treats you unfairly, and you write about what happened on your Facebook page. Your boss fi nds out what you wrote and fi res you.
2. Your school newspaper is produced by the journalism class. Your public school principal objects to the content of an article and censors the newspaper.
3. Your parents won’t let you have a MySpace page.
4. Police arrest a professional reporter for writing an article that criticizes the government.

Activities to Do Before the Lesson

It is very important that students are engaged with the subject you will be teaching before the instruction begins. In a classroom, this can be done in many different ways. Below, you will find four activities that can be done before the lesson plan begins to help engage students with the materials and get them excited for the lesson.

Activity 1

This activity is designed to help make sure the students understand the materials as  discussed in the previous lesson. For this class, it was the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

1. Review the Bill of Rights as discussed in the previous session
2. Distribute Bill of Rights match game sheets and demonstrate to students how to construct the activity:
   1. Place the situation card worksheet face down on the desk.
   2. Fold in half.
   3. Open up the sheet and fold each side to the middle fold. This will make the situation cards visible.
   4. Cut between the situation cards so that each card is on a flap. Cut out the amendment cards.
3. Have students paste the proper amendment card underneath each situation card. This can be an individual or small group activity.
4. Review the answers to the Amendment/Situation Match

Activity 2

This activity will help engage students by giving them the opportunity to put into practice what was discussed in the previous class, but also what will be discussed in this class.

1. Explain to the class that they will be putting the Bill of Rights into action by petitioning their local authorities for a change.
2. Distribute and review the Write a Petition direction and format sheet. Ask students to suggest “changes” they would like to see. After discussion, limit the list to four or five topics.
3. Arrange students in groups by “change” topics.
4. Working in groups, students will complete and sign their petition using the format sheet.
5. Once completed, students will present their petition to the class seeking additional signatures.
6. Submitting a final copy of the petition to the authority is at the teacher’s discretion.

Activity 3

This matching game will give students the opportunity to check their knowledge of the Bill of Rights. This activity can be done either on their own or as a class.

Activity 4

An easy activity to get the students re-engaged with the material is a word search for the important words as they pertain to the Bill of Rights.

Remembering Vocabulary

 

It is vitally important when reading history textbooks that you understand what the vocabulary terms mean. Understanding the vocabulary words you come across is important to understanding what you are reading. Below are the important words in this chapter and some words from the previous chapter that are important.

Important vocabulary:

Constitution

Checks and balances

Civil

Civil liberties

Free speech

Censorship

Petition

Slander

Libel

The three activities below are designed to help students learn their vocabulary words. It begins with a general game to help with comprehension of the vocabulary, then understanding how the word was used in the passage, then taking what they know by using the word.

Vocabulary Game

To help ensure that students understand what the vocabulary words mean, an activity needs to be done that helps test their comprehension of the definitions. In this example the students will be completing a crossword puzzle that includes all the above listed vocabulary words with the definitions being the clue.

Crossword created with Armored Penguin

Making Sense of Vocabulary in Context

Once the students have completed the crossword and you are confident they understand the definitions, then you can have them move onto a harder activity as it relates to the vocabulary.

In every textbook, the vocabulary is integrated with a passage. For example, using one of the above vocabulary words it appears in the text as: “The First Amendment gives us the right to send petitions to the government.  A petition is a formal request for the government to act.” In this example, the first sentence uses the vocabulary word petition in context, then defines the word. Have your student go through their textbook and take the passages that use the vocabulary word in context, and re-write the sentence. The above example could be changed to something like, “The First Amendment gives people the right to send a formal request to the government to act.”

Using Vocabulary

Once the student has had the chance to practice making sense of the vocabulary words for the chapter in the context of the chapter and they are confident in their skills, it is time to have them use those vocabulary words to explain what they are learning. For this chapter, they students could be asked to write a short essay on the First Amendment using the vocabulary words from the textbook. This will help teachers and parents see if the student has a grasp of both the content in the chapter and the new vocabulary words presented in the chapter.

References

Bill of Rights. (n.d.). Retrieved November 29, 2016, from https://quia.com/cc/67829.html

Bill of Rights Match Game. (n.d.). Retrieved November 29, 2016, from

http://texaslregames.org/games_web_eng/BOR/billofrights.html

Butler, S., Urrutia, K., Buenger, A., & Hunt, M. (2010). A Review of the Current Research on Comprehension Instruction. Retrieved November 19, 2016.

Celebrate the Constitution Game | Scholastic.com. (n.d.). Retrieved November 29, 2016, from http://www.scholastic.com/teachers/activity/celebrate-constitution-game

Crossword puzzle maker. (n.d.). Retrieved November 29, 2016, from http://www.armoredpenguin.com/crossword/

Ogle, D., Klemp, R., & McBride, B. (n.d.). Chapter 1. Reading Social Studies Texts. Retrieved November 29, 2016, from http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/106010/chapters/Reading-Social-Studies-Texts.aspx  (1)

Scholastic News: Constitution Day. (n.d.). Retrieved November 29, 2016, from http://teacher.scholastic.com/scholasticnews/indepth/constitution_day/constitution_day/index.asp?article=benfranklin

Would you Fight for All Five? Weighing Our First Amendment Fredoms. (n.d.). Retrieved November 29, 2016, from https://1forallnet.files.wordpress.com/2010/06/fight_five.pdf