Teachers First - Thinking Teachers Teaching Thinkers

The Lowell Milken Center discovers, develops and communicates the stories of Unsung Heroes who have made a profound and positive impact on the course of history. Click Programs on the top menu and select Unsung Hero Projects to learn about everyday people who became heroes by standing up to adversity in their lives. Each project features information about the hero and the storyteller. Some projects include links to student-created web pages and videos. If your district blocks YouTube, the videos may not be viewable. Start your own Unsung Hero project using the ten steps provided to include inspiration from start to finish.

tag(s): heroes (24)

Discover some of history's real life heroes at History's Heroes. Learn the story of little-known people from history, explore their timeline, read and hear other's views and opinions, listen/view audio stories with more information, then decide for yourself if each person is really a hero using the interactive activity. There are also links to Encode a Message or Record Your Own Speech. Explore the teacher resources for lesson ideas and curriculum links. Heroes range from Anne Askew to Elizabeth Fry to Allen Turing and many others.

tag(s): american revolution (85), england (54), heroes (24), holocaust (41), slavery (67), world war 1 (57), world war 2 (139)

View interactive peace maps, reports, and news pertaining to peace around the world. A variety of qualitative and quantitative indicators are used to create a Global Peace Index. View changes from 2008 to present. Choose various indicators to portray on the map and compare different countries. Click in the middle of the map on "About the GPI" (or other index you have opened) to read how it is calculated. Be sure to check out the Terrorism Index as well as a US Peace Index that compares each of the States in the United States. Hover over that State to view the actual rank. When the site introduces a new topic, that topic appears on the main page of this site. To get to the other topics, use the top tool bar.

tag(s): countries (82), states (164), terrorism (45)

Nobelprize.org is the official website of the Nobel Prize. Here you find information about Alfred Nobel, the prizewinners, interviews, and photos. Videos of interviews of Nobel peace prizewinners, speeches, ceremonies, interviews, banquets, lectures, announcements, award ceremonies, and documentaries fill the gamut of all of the prizewinners. The Nobel prizes awards are in literature, chemistry, medicine, peace, economics, and physics. Varieties of educational games/activities help explain many of the Nobel Award winners' work. This site clearly explains and illustrates the purpose of the awards, the award winners, and their ideas. Videos give an insider look at each of the winners.

tag(s): creativity (119), literature (267), medicine (68)

The History Channel's addition to the broad, sweeping genre of American history series is America: The Story of Us (don't miss the play on words: Us/US), airing over 12 hours, two episodes at a time. Each episode is about 45 minutes in length. At the time of this review there were brief episode guides, video clips from episodes, a PDF version of a classroom study guide that can be downloaded for free, links to download episodes on itunes (for a FEE), and a number of other promotional links. You can also order the entire series on DVD. Some historians will turn up their noses as the History Channel attempts to cover the history of the United States in 12 hours, including commercials. Important issues will be missed, historic players will be overlooked, and complex topics will be over-simplified. However, it is precisely this sort of effort that can hook kids who aren't ordinarily interested in history in taking a second look.

tag(s): civil war (142), evolution (101), great depression (27), lincoln (83), memorial day (13)

Inspire students to believe they can make a difference in the world. "Pennies for Peace" is an international service-learning project that does not ask families to contribute large sums of money. Author of the book "Three Cups of Tea," Greg Mortenson, and his young daughter Amira believe that by donating pennies children can help support education in Afghanistan and Pakistan while simultaneously promoting peace.

The project comes with an extensive toolkit that shows how to implement the campaign, provides background resources and curriculum materials. The toolkit is grouped by the grade levels, K-4, 4-8, and 9-12. The Pennies for Peace Curriculum directly links to grade level standards in social studies, math, and literacy. In order to participate schools need to register on-line. There is a page for "kids" that provides facts about a typical village and school and background information about Pakistan and Afghanistan. The tool kit contains videos and photographs as well as maps from National Geographic that are free for download. The videos will take participants through the steps of implementing the project to interviewing Greg Mortenson, possible classroom applications, and short clips to support sections of their curriculum. Address core subjects such as social studies, math, history, geography, science and language arts while enhancing cultural awareness in your students.

tag(s): critical thinking (118)

This lesson plan enables students to identify characteristics that are common to heroes, recognize heroes from many diverse cultures, and discuss how heroes can be any type of person who has accomplished an inspiring action. It offers this in nine 45-minute class lessons. The instructional objectives make it easy to pick and choose which lessons you want to do in the order in which you want to do them. It offers a great, classic base of Aristotelian hero qualities while also enabling you to bring the idea of hero forward into modern times.

tag(s): literature (267)

This short unit examines America's only two father-and-son presidents - John Adams and John Quincy Adams, and George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush. Students investigate the role and responsibilities of the presidency while comparing and contrasting each father-son pair. Includes suggested activities and links to online material about the presidents. The lesson plans are aligned to standards.

tag(s): presidents (124)