CEFLS: Black History: Lesson Plans: Grades 6-8

Lesson Plans

African American Social Studies Topics
Students in grades K-12 learn about and celebrate the contributions of African American as well as learn more about the Civil Rights Movement and more.
NEA: Black History Month Lessons and Resources
Integrating African-American Culture & History into Your Curriculum
Jacob Lawrence's Migration Series: Removing the Mask
Students in grades 6-8 analyze and compare visual and poetic works by Jacob Lawrence, Helene Johnson, and Paul Laurence Dunbar and consider how they represent changing roles of African Americans.
NMAAHC Education
The Smithsonian’s newest museum, the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), was established in 2003 and is scheduled to open on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in 2015. The educator’s page of the NMAAHC website includes lessons in art and science as well as history and culture. Each lesson lists curriculum connections.

Activities

Black Wings: African American Pioneer Aviators
This National Air and Space Museum online exhibition includes classroom activities for grades 5-12. The exhibition site itself provides background for the lessons.
Notable African Americans from the 18th-century to the present
In this Jeopardy-type quiz game students in grades 5-12 can choose from three levels of difficulty to test their knowledge of famous African Americans. Spelling counts, for example Billy Holiday rather than Billie Holiday would be marked incorrect.
The Underground Railroad
K-12 students make decisions as they follow Harriet Tubman and escape from a slave owner in this online interactive.

Social Studies

African American History Month Exhibits & Collections
Resources covering art and design, baseball, civil rights, culture, folklife, military, music and performing arts, religion, slavery, and resource guides.
Africans in America
Images, documents, stories, biographies, and commentaries. The site provides teacher’s and youth guides. The four part series may be in local libraries.
Black History - Biography - Celebrate Black History Month & People
Biographies, timelines, photos, video, game, quiz, and 101 fast facts.
Black Labor History
Lessons and links on the life histories of people whose struggle was part of a larger social and economic movement to improve the lives of the working class.
EDSITEment's Guide to African American History and Culture in the United States
Investigate the contributions African Americans have made in the history and cultural development of the United States.
The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow
Stories, interactive maps, activities and tools, and lesson plans and activities for grades 6-12.
Separate Is Not Equal - Brown v. Board of Education
History, images, and other resources covering the historic Supreme Court ruling ending segregation and ensuring opportunity in education.
W. E. B. Du Bois: Online Resources
Includes digital materials related to W. E .B. Du Bois and links to external websites.

Art

African American Visual Art and the Black Arts Movement
The Black Arts Movement (BAM) began in the mid-1960s to provide a new vision of African Americans. This site provides images galleries a theoretical essay, timeline, and links to other online art sources. Note: the top banner links are dead but the bottom links are functional.
The Art and Life of William H. Johnson
In this set of four lessons, students examine works by African American painter William H. Johnson to learn about his milieu as well as his style. Younger students list the elements of the pictures, identifying colors and shapes and such objects as farm equipment, crops, and animals.
The Black Past: Remembered and Reclaimed
African American History by region.
The Blues and Langston Hughes
Students learn the structure of the blues stanza—both in music and in the blues-based poems of Langston Hughes—in this set of four lessons. Younger students compose their own three-line blues poems. Older students listen for details of the Great Migration in recordings of rural and urban blues from Smithsonian Folkways.
The History of Hip-Hop
A collection of interviews from National Public Radio (NPR) that chronicle the seminal people and events in the hip-hop movement.
Jazz: A Film by Ken Burns
Online activities and biographies, transcripts of many interviews with musicians, K-12 lesson plans, and a music study guide for grades 5-8.
Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits
Students look at both African American history and the history of portraiture in this set of four lessons. Portrait subjects include Sojourner Truth, Mohammed Ali, Ella Fitzgerald, and Leontyne Price. The youngest students make their own photographic “calling cards.” Older students do research on the portrait subjects.
Poems to Celebrate Black History Month
Poems and articles by African-Americans.

Science

African Americans in Science and Technology
Links from the Library of Congress.
Black Wings: African American Pioneer Aviators
In this set of four lessons, students examine photographic portraits and biographies to learn about the history of African Americans in the field of aviation. They portray the aviators in drawing, painting, or writing.

Sport

African American Athletes
Brief biographies and film clips of outstanding African American athletes. Don’t miss the links to legal and political figures, scientists and educators, activists, artists and writers, entertainers, and musicians and singers.

Links for Kids

Quizes

Printables

Audio

Science Update: Spotlight on African-American Scientists
Students in grades 6-12 can listen to interviews with a select group of black scientists working in North America today.
Blues Journey
This four part audio series explores the history of the blues.

Juvenile DVD's

Wind Flyers
Call Number: DVD JD WIN
ISBN: 9781933938905
Publication Date: 2007
A young African-American boy tells about his great-great-uncle who was 'a wind flyer.' He describes his uncle's lifelong passion for aviation, from his boyhood attempts at flight by jumping off the roof of a chicken coop to his eventual career as a Tuskegee Airman. Uncle reminisces about the brave young Tuskegee wind flyers and occasionally takes the boy on a flight 'into the wind, against the wind, beyond the wind.
History I Need to Know: Heroes of Freedom Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks
Call Number: DVD J923.23 HIS
Written and developed for young viewers, the life and times of Harriet Tubman and Rosa Parks will come alive for children in these live-action programs about two of America's most enduring heroes of freedom. Stirring dramatizations and historically accurate reenactments, photographs and colorful maps help tell their stories.

Black History: Lesson Plans: Grades 6-8

Lesson Plans

Activities

Social Studies

Art

Science

Sport

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Links for Kids

Quizes

Printables

Audio

Juvenile DVD's