GRADE LEVEL: Middle School
COMMON CORE STANDARDS: Reading, Speaking and Listening In November 2014, the National Center on Family Homelessness reported that one child in every thirty — or 2.5 million children in the U.S. — were homeless at some point in 2013. Many advocates blame the country’s high poverty rate on a lack of affordable housing, among other causes. Even though the child homeless rate is at an all-time high, people who are homeless are typically…
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GRADE LEVEL: Elementary School
COMMON CORE STANDARDS: Reading, Speaking and Listening The First Girl to Pitch a Shutout in the Little League World Series
In 2014 Mo’Ne Davis, a 13-year-old girl, made news headlines as the first girl to ever pitch a shutout in the Little League World series. At that time she was considered the “most talked about baseball player on earth right now” according to many observers in the sports world. Mo’Ne (pronounced Moh-nay…
GRADE LEVEL: Middle School, High School
COMMON CORE STANDARDS: Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening Over the years, student dress codes have sought to address a wide range of issues and have incited different degrees of controversy. For example, in the late 1960s and 70s, young men with long hair were sometimes physically attacked by their classmates and, as a result, many schools required boys to wear their hair cut to their ears or shorter. In the 1990s, there was a push for dress…
Bullying is a major problem in our schools. When it targets aspects of a person’s identity, it is called identity-based bullying, and may include bias about appearance, race, culture, gender and gender expression, language, religion, socioeconomic status, disability and sexual orientation. According to GLSEN’s 2012 report Playground and Prejudice: Elementary School Climate in the United States, two-thirds of elementary students attribute the bullying and name‐calling that…
GRADE LEVEL: Elementary School
COMMON CORE STANDARDS: Reading, Writing, Language Using Poetry to Teach about Identity
Reading and writing poetry can provide an opening for young people to explore the various aspects of their identity, including their name, race and ethnicity, physical characteristics and more.
April is National Poetry Month, a good opportunity to explore poetry with your students. Because poetry does not require strict sentence structure or the usual grammar rules…
GRADE LEVEL: Middle School, High School
COMMON CORE STANDARDS: Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening César Chávez was a Mexican American labor activist, civil rights advocate and leader of the United Farm Workers. During the 1960s and 70s, he was a leading voice for migrant farm workers. His leadership focused national attention on these laborers’ working conditions, which eventually led to improvements. In 2008, President Obama proclaimed March 31 Cé…
GRADE LEVEL: Middle School, High School In celebration and memory of the life of Nelson Mandela, this special edition of the Current Events Classroom provides students the opportunity to learn, in several ways, more about Nelson Mandela and his extraordinary life.