Black History Month

Are you looking for ways to include Black History Month into your lessons? Are you looking for better engagement and innovation? You are in luck!

In my classroom, we are working on adjectives, descriptive language, nouns, main idea, recounting stories, demonstrating how to find key details in a text, identifying how characters respond to challenges, using digital tools to publish writing, and African American Heroes (Jackie Robinson). Instead of segmenting these, I combined them along with cross cutting standards to build our latest Design Challenge. They were given the text (differentiated by Lexile Levels). They had to identify the aforementioned standards within the text by highlighting, underlining, circling etc. The lesson COULD HAVE ended there... But that wouldn't be ME. We extended the learning to create a baseball image using graphic design software. What made it difficult (critical thinking) was that the words MOST important to the standards addressed in the text had to STAND OUT to their audience. This is how I was able to assess their level of mastery (if the bolded words were supporting details, adjectives and nouns describing the main character, then they understood and could apply the standard). If you're looking for a way to keep lessons engaging and innovative... Take a look!