Welcome to the In the Americas Curriculum Guide. This guide provides an interdisciplinary lesson for each video that corresponds to the content of the video. There are approximately ten lessons per season.
Overview of Lessons:
Each lesson has five different parts to it: a general learning objective, Social Studies standards, discussion prompts, lesson activities and vocabulary words. The lesson also provides a link to the videos and a summary of the video. Here is some information about each part of the lesson plan:
Learning Objective – This is a general objective focused on the main topics in the video.
Social Studies Standard – Standards are selected from the Middle Grades of the curriculum standards section of the National Council for Social Studies Curriculum. Although the standards are focused on Social Studies, teachers can pull from other content area standards since the lesson activities are interdisciplinary.
Discussion Prompts – Discussion prompts are high level questions that promote oral discussion between partners, small groups of students, or a whole class discussion. The goal is to encourage deeper thinking grounded in evidence from the content of the video, and to explore ideas in the video from multiple perspectives.
Lesson Activities – The lesson activities are extended interdisciplinary activities that are hands- on, minds-on opportunities. These may take a whole class period to complete and additional materials may be used. The goal of these activities is for students to have time for an exploratory, enriched lesson that can deepen the content from the videos, and to extend the information from the video.
Vocabulary Words – These highlighted words are thematic terms from the video that students can explore more thoroughly by using in sentences, summaries, or by incorporating in the lesson activities.