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Lesson Plans
These lesson plans can be adapted to suit students in 4th-12th grades. They are divided into the four thematic units featured on the Web site: daily life, slavery, war and soldiers' lives, and women. Each lesson focuses on one or more primary source documents including letters, news articles and advertisements from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, photographs, sketches, and poems. Students learn how to "read" original documents and differentiate between fact and opinion.
Children are expected to read and write about primary source documents on the 5th and 8th grade New York State Social Studies Exams. These lessons are intended to help prepare them for that test, and give them a taste of local history from almost 150 years ago. The lessons require reading, writing, listening, and speaking as well as critical thinking skills. In addition, students are often asked to "put themselves in the shoes" of a figure from history or relate past events to themselves and their families.
Each lesson includes an aim, objective, list of materials needed, and step-by-step procedure. All materials or links to these materials are included. Teachers are encouraged to choose lessons of particular interest or relevance to their classes or curricula. All lessons may be copied or changed as teachers see fit. We hope you enjoy them!
The Lesson Plans are arranged below by theme. You may download the lesson plans in Microsoft Word format or in Adobe Acrobat format. To view or print the PDF files, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader, a free software application available on Adobe's Web site.
You may also download all of the lesson plans in one ZIP file (7MB).
 | Soldiers |
| Lesson 1.1: Causes of the Civil War |
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| Lesson 1.2: The Draft (Part 1) |
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| Lesson 1.3: The Draft (Part 2) |
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| Lesson 1.4: The Draft (Part 3): Draft Simulation Activity |
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| Lesson 1.5: A Soldier's Life |
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| Lesson 1.6: Prisoner of War |
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| Lesson 1.7: "Life Among Fifty Thousand Sick Soldiers" |
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| Lesson 1.8: Civil War Monuments in Brooklyn |
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| Lesson 1.9: Red Legs: A Drummer Boy of the Civil War by Ted Lewin |
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| Lesson 1.10: Reenactor Math |
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| Lesson 1.11: Weapons of War - The Monitor |
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 | Slavery |
| Lesson 2.1: Only Passing Through: The Story of Sojourner Truth by Anne Rockwell |
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| Lesson 2.2: Harriet Tubman in the News |
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| Lesson 2.3: "Pink" |
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| Lesson 2.4: History Repeats Itself |
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| Lesson 2.5: Frederick Douglass (2 days) |
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| Lesson 2.6: The Lott House - A History Mystery |
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 | Women |
| Lesson 3.1: You Forgot Your Skirt, Amelia Bloomer! by Shana Corey (Scholastic, 2000) |
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| Lesson 3.2: The Sanitary Commission |
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| Lesson 3.3: Follow-Up Math Lesson - Inflation |
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| Lesson 3.4: Soldier Emily |
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| Lesson 3.5: The Making of a Spy |
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| Lesson 3.6: Susan B. Anthony and Women's Suffrage |
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| Lesson 3.7: The Ballot Box Battle by Emily Arnold McCully |
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| Lesson 3.8: "The Women Who Went to the Field" by Clara Barton |
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 | Daily Life |
| Lesson 4.1: At the Movies |
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| Lesson 4.2: Household Names |
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| Lesson 4.3: The Man Who Made Parks: The Story of Parkbuilder Frederick Law Olmsted by Frieda Wishinsky |
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| Lesson 4.4: Mapping Central Park |
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| Lesson 4.5: "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" by Walt Whitman |
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| Lesson 4.6: The Immigrants of Brooklyn: Now and Then |
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| Lesson 4.7: Coney Island |
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| Lesson 4.8: Advertisements |
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| Lesson 4.9: Play Ball |
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These lesson plans were written by Barbara Auerbach, a school librarian at a New York City Public School in Brooklyn. She has co-authored two ESL writing texts as well as contributed curriculum for The Brooklyn Expedition lesson plans. She also reviews children's books, reference, and videos for School Library Journal.
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