ESL etc.

I just became aware of A Young People’s History of the United States,a version of Howard Zinn’s classic targeted towards younger readers. I haven’t seen the book myself yet, but I suspect that it would work well with English learners, too.

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Howard Zinn passed away on Wednesday. He is one of my favorite authors and educators, and he will certainly be missed.
Recently, Rethinking Schools and Teaching for Change launched the Zinn Education Project, a collection of resources for teaching A People’s History of the United States. There are tons of great materials here for […]

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The Guardian has a visual representation of the words used in Obama’s 2010 State of the Union Address, as well as visualizations of earlier States of the Union. It’s interesting to see how things have changed over time. One obvious thing is how much more “America” and “Americans” feature in recent speeches, compared […]

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A Class Divided is a wonderful episode of Frontline that shows an ingenious two-day activity undertaken by the third grade class of teacher Jane Elliot. In this activity, devised the night Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, Elliot divides her class into blue-eyes and brown-eyes. On the first day, the blue-eyed students are […]

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I was recently asked for suggestions for materials that could be used with younger learners. Here are a few of my favorites.

Facing the Future has a collection of activity-based, global issues lesson plans for students of all ages. In addition to the great stuff they offer for sale, they have a ton of […]

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Worldmapper has a large collection of world maps that display various issues in a simple yet effective way. They expand each country to illustrate their share in a given issue. For example, the map below illustrates each country’s proportion of the world’s child labor.
Worldmapper has maps on many, many topics, including poverty, gender […]

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I’ve been pretty busy at work the past couple of weeks, so I’ve got a backlog of things I want to post, but I wanted to quickly share a bunch of resources that I’ve found for teaching about the protests in Iran.
As usual, Larry Ferlazzo has pulled together a lot of great links in his […]

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The International School Studies Association at the University of Denver has a large collection of links to lesson plans that deal with global issues. They break them down thematically (Cultural Studies, Environmental Studies, Economics, etc.) and by grade level. There are tons of lessons available here, so there are bound to be some […]

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We’ve got a group of 50 or so Korean elementary school teachers here at the ELI for a month-long program. Today, I gave them a brief workshop introducing a poetry activity that I have used in the past. Basically, I have students read, write, then discuss poems built around particular structures. I […]

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I just read a great article on a very interesting activity that a college anthropology professor does with a few hundred students in a lecture class.
He breaks them into groups of about 20, and assigns each group a culture. They spend a few weeks preparing, and the class culminates in the World Sim activity […]

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