This unit is designed to build inquiry about and interest in the themes and topics woven throughout Educurious’s multi-unit Washington State History course. To start off, students discover and share how they are connected to their classmates by participating in a “Web of Connectedness” activity. Throughout the unit, students engage in mapping, data visualization, and cost-benefit analyses in order to unpack the theme of connectedness and answer the unit driving question: How are people in Washington connected to each other and the rest of the world? As students learn about resources, economies, innovations, people, and places in Washington, they draft a series of six interactive community boards that educate others about the ways in which people are connected. For the culminating product of this unit, student teams finalize one of their six draft community boards to help students in their school make connections between themselves, Washington, and the world.

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.

In this activity students will analyze the Declaration of Intention for Albert Einstein and identify how the document demonstrates content contained within Article I, sections 8-10 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.

From the 1960s to the 1990s, economically-disadvantaged school districts, primarily Latino, in Texas struggled to gain more adequate funding for their children's education. At first halted by a Supreme Court ruling, one leader gained additional support and continued pressing the issue, with the result that eventually the Court reversed its stance and required the state to develop a more equitable funding plan.Students will consider the historic actions taken by the communities and the Court and how their own community action can and should make a difference.

Every media source has a story to tell--a driving purpose. The media that people consume largely shapes their world views. The US public is becoming more divided partially due to the consumption of increasingly biased news. As a critical consumer of media, It is important to be able to separate fact from opinion. In this unit, adapted from the high school version, students will become critical consumers of news, by identifying media bias in order to become better informed citizens.  NOTE: This unit has been adapted for use at the middle school level from the resource Identifying Media Bias in News Sources by Sandra Stroup, Sally Drendel, Greg Saum, and Heidi Morris.

This inquiry takes students through analysis and evaluation of the Compelling Question “Should Washington State Ban the use of Native American mascots in their schools?” Students will be learning about the persuasive techniques of Political Cartoons, analyzing articles and images, reading interviews, and watching YouTube videos. The summative performance task is writing a letter to the Washington State Board of education stating their claim on whether or not they should or shouldn't allow schools to use Native American mascots.

Students begin this unit by exploring the themes of humanity and community as they discuss  the many factors that influence the development of personal identities. They unpack together how we show versus hide different parts of ourselves, and how our identities can be both fixed and ever-changing. Then, students listen to oral histories by Vietnamese Americans in Washington to learn how displacement and resettlement have impacted them personally and shaped their outlook on helping others. Using evidence from these firsthand accounts, students answer the question: What can the experiences of displaced people teach us about community, resilience, and humanity? Throughout this unit, students work in teams to create a podcast where they reflect on their collective responsibility to stand in solidarity with displaced people.

This unit begins with a challenge in which students must make a decision for the common good. The task highlights the importance of considering various stakeholder perspectives in order to serve the common good. Students transfer what they have learned to their study of a major dam project in Washington State. Teams focus on one of four projects (Upper Skagit Hydroelectric Project, Lower Snake River Project, Columbia River Gorge Project, Columbia River Basin Project). Each team works together to understand the perspectives of diverse stakeholders as they develop a response to the unit-driving question: How can dams in Washington serve the common good? Teams apply what they have learned to come up with a recommendation for the future of the dam project that considers how it will impact people and places.

These Teacher Guides were created by Washington educators to accompany the League of Women Voters of Washington's book The State We're In: Washington - Your guide to state, tribal and local government.Each chapter guide is  aligned with Washington Social Studies Learning Standards and includes a launch activity, focused notes, text-dependent questions, and an inquiry lesson developed using the C3 Framework. 

 Verifying social media posts is quickly becoming a necessary endeavor in everyday life, let alone in the world of education. Social media has moved beyond a digital world which connects with friends and family and has become a quick and easy way to access news, information, and human interest stories from around the world. As this state of media has become the "new normal," especially for our younger generations, we, educators, find ourselves charged with a new task of teaching our students how to interact with and safely consume digital information.The following three modules are designed to be used as stand-alone activities or combined as one unit, in which the lessons can be taught in any order. "Who Said What?!" is a module focusing on author verification. "A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words'' is a module devoted to image verification. "Getting the Facts Straight" is a module designed to dive into information verification. Lastly, there are assessment suggestions to be utilized after completing all three modules.