Japanese American Memorial Pilgrimages has developed lessons, supplemental resources, and educational documentary videos to accompany the memoir Child Prisoner in American Concentration Camps by Mako Nakagawa.

In this activity students will analyze the Senate Journal of the First Congress and identify how the document demonstrates content contained within Article II of the Constitution in action.

This activity is designed to prepare students for the Constitution-in-Action Lab at the National Archives in Washington, DC. It is a part of a package of activities associated with the lab experience.

Drumbeats in Time is a collaborative effort between the Thorp School District and members of the Kittitas Band of the Yakama Nation. These units are designed to integrate local Native American oral history and interview skills into the social studies curriculum to help students gain understanding of the life and times of various members of the Kittitas Valley.The sixth grade unit focuses on accounts of modern life and past life in order to develop an understanding of cultural awarness in the future.

This inquiry by Amy Johnson, Longview Public Schools, is based on the C3 Framework inquiry arc. Students will look at multiple points of view on an assigned Intolerable Act. After researching primary sources, student will create a newspaper using BEST evidence from their sources that answers the question, "Why would this event the colonists to revolt?"

As part of Washington's Kip Tokuda Memorial Civil Liberties Public Education Program, which strives to educate the public regarding the history and the lessons of the World War II exclusion, removal, and detention of persons of Japanese ancestry, KSPS Public Television and Eastern Washington educators Starla Fey, Leslie Heffernan, and Morgen Larsen have produced Injustice at Home: the Japanese American experience of the World War II Era.

This educational resource--five educational videos and an inquiry-based unit of study--will help students understand Executive Order 9066 and the resulting internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II, the failure of political leadership to protect constitutional rights, the military experience of Japanese-Americans during WWII, and examples of discrimination and racial prejudice the Japanese-American community faced before, during and after WWII.

In addition, students will analyze the short and long term emotional effects on those who are incarcerated, identify the challenges that people living outside of the exclusion zone faced, examine how some Japanese Americans showed their loyalty during the period of incarceration, and learn about brave individuals who stood up for Japanese Americans during this time.

Students kick off the unit with an analysis of images by engaging in a Four Corners activity, in which they begin to unpack the many positive and negative impacts of innovations on communication, infrastructure, and workers’ rights. After this initial analysis, students listen to oral histories, read narrative accounts, and study photos of people and places, to answer the question: How does innovation impact communities in Washington? Throughout the unit, students research a transformative innovation in workers rights, communication, and infrastructure in order to create a thought-provoking photo essay about how their chosen innovation impacts people and places in Washington.

Learn more about the stories and legacy of over 13,000 Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during World War II at Minidoka Relocation Center, an American concentration camp in Idaho. 

This is an accompanying teacher's guide to the graphic novel "Fighting for America: Nisei Soldiers. The book is a compilation of 6 Nisei, second-generation Japanese Americans, veteran's oral histories. These emotional first-person accounts are visceral and graphically moving. These veterans take us on the journey into intelligence units, into the life of a medic, and into gripping and pivotal moments of the Second World War. The books are available in multiple bookstores and library systems. For more information on where to find this novel, contact education@wingluke.org.