In small groups and class discussion, students share knowledge about Christopher Columbus and his voyages, learn about the impact of Columbus, and consider some ecological and political results of the encounter.

In this lesson students use the Informational Text Analysis Tool to deconstruct the essential elements of informational text. Informational text is more important to teachers than ever before, especially with the rise of the new Core standards. The Library of Congress is an excellent resource for finding and using texts to build students' reading skills.Through a diverse array of classic and contemporary literature as well as challenging informational and primary source texts, students build knowledge, gain insights, explore possibilities, and broaden their perspective.

Using published writers' texts and students' own writing, this unit explores emotions that are associated with the artful and deliberate use of commas, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points (end-stop marks of punctuation).

How do we, as youth, respond to gun violence in our communities? The Gun Violence webcast explores gun violence in Pakistan, Somalia, and the United States.

How can we, as youth, build a sustainable future while meeting the energy needs of today? The Path to Sustainable Energy (PaSE) curriculum explores sustainable energy as students investigate place-based energy resource and consumption issues, gather resources, and build leadership skills to identify and take action on shared challenges and impacts of energy usage.

Global Citizens in Action is a civic engagement curriculum that focuses on cultural exchange, media literacy, and global citizenship. Through exploring the driving question, “How do we, as youth, engage our communities to create positive social change?”

In this lesson students use a structured format (an adaptation of Think-Pair-Share) to discuss and deconstruct complex text. The new core standards emphasize the importance of developing students' speaking and listening skills as well as helping them access complex text through reading, re-reading, re-thinking, and re-examining.The purpose of this lesson is to get the students to focus and stay on topic while they talk. As a result, students are required to think more extensively about a topic by repeatedly reading and discussing with others.

Social change, at its core, does not come from one event or incident, but the long, sustained work of individuals and groups in numerous sectors of society. How do we, as youth, participate in sustaining positive social change in our communities?

How does global warming affect humans? The Climate Change Webcast explores the causes and effects of climate change as students work together to create an international climate change proposal to present at the United Nations Climate Summit.

In this module, students will read, discuss, and analyze contemporary and classic texts, focusing on how complex characters develop through interactions with one another and how authors structure text to accomplish that development. There will be a strong emphasis on reading closely and responding to text dependent questions, annotating text, and developing academic vocabulary in context.

In this module, students engage with literature and nonfiction texts that develop central ideas of guilt, obsession, and madness, among others. Building on work with evidence-based analysis and debate in Module 1, students will produce evidence-based claims to analyze the development of central ideas and text structure. Students will develop and strengthen their writing by revising and editing, and refine their speaking and listening skills through discussion-based assessments.

Highlighting the film, Girl Rising, this curriculum seeks to examine the barriers that prevent children, specifically girls, from accessing education. The curriculum engages students in a critical discussion of: "How do we, as youth, create solutions to overcome the challenges of access to education?"

How do we, as youth, engage our communities to positively address human rights issues? The Rights of the Child curriculum explores human rights in an effort to foster cultural awareness, bring to light the rights of the child, and activate global citizenship among youth through international dialogue and collaboration.

Youth worldwide are in danger due to small arms and conventional weapons. How do we, as youth, participate in the global debate on gun control?

The Wasted: Don't Trash the Earth curriculum asks students to examine the impact of the waste we locally and globally produce and seek creative solutions to reduce this wastefulness by answering the driving question: "How can we, as youth, rethink waste?"

In this lesson students use a Tuning Protocol to give and receive peer-to-peer feedback on student writing in a structured, safe environment.

GIST is a strategy to help students write brief, accurate, and complete summaries of material they read. In this lesson students work together summarizing larger and larger portions of text, but keeping their summaries at 25 words or fewer. Students will be able to summarize portions of informational or literary text. Students will be able to work in small groups to think critically about and discuss text.

'Lived History' documents the making of the Wind River Virtual Museum, a high definition archive of Eastern Shoshone and Northern Arapaho ancestral artifacts. In the accompanying lesson plan (found in the Support Materials) students will learn from the time when Europeans first traveled in North America, they took collectors' interest in the arts, weaponry and attire of Native Americans. Sometimes they purchased artifacts, sometimes they stole them, and sometimes they killed for them. Over the years, pipes, war bonnets, cradle boards and parfleches accumulated in museums. The method of acquisition was often forgotten; exact historical documentation was often difficult. Many of the artifacts have perished or deteriorated over time. Many ancient artifacts remain in the vaults and display cases of museums far from their place of origin or the people who might best explain and appreciate them.

"Lived History" documents the creation of the 'Wind River Virtual Museum'—an archive of high definition images of ancestral artifacts created with guidance from Wind River tribal elders. Items like nineteenth century amulets, bags, drums, ceremonial headdresses and robes, everyday clothing, medicine related objects, hunting apparel, moccasins, and other meaningful objects were brought out of storage and displayed for the elders. Their commentary becomes part of the precarious and precious transmission of oral culture that the people of Wind River strive to honor and preserve, for future generations.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES:

Students will learn about different artifacts of the Shoshone and the Arapaho people and their significance/use.
Students will gain a deeper appreciation for the resiliency of people and the importance of cultural preservation.
Students will explore their own cultural identity and understand that culture is a system of beliefs, values, and assumptions about life that guide behavior and are shared by a group of people.
Students will name three objects identified in the Lived History video and gain an understanding of their uses and cultural significance.
Students will dentify some of the resources used to make traditional items and locate areas in which these resources are found.

With a focus on education in Afghanistan, the Witness to Education in Afghanistan and Throughout the World curriculum examines global and local examples of how education can be use to create social change. Students address the driving question: "How can we, as youth, utilize education to promote positive change within our communities?"

In an eight week unit of study, students will explore concepts of migration through the lens of cultural identity and perspective. What are elements of culture that shape us, shape how we see others, and shape how we are seen in return? Students will investigate shifts in cultural norms and stereotypes specific to forced migration and captivity as depicted in The Tempest by William Shakespeare and supplemented through a variety of texts, discussions, and reflections.