Teaching History: The Greensboro Sit-Ins

Happy New Year, Y'all!! I can't believe it's 2016 already. I thought I'd start off the new year with a little confession - something that I'm sure a lot of people can related to.  Growing up... I hated loathed history.  I don't know why.  It was just so boring to me.  The funny thing is, I had great history teachers in late high school, but I think by that time, I hated it so much nothing was going to salvage my feelings toward history! Anyone else?

Well, then I grew up.  And let me tell you- I stinkin' LOVE history now.  It's so cool to think about the things that have happened in the past. to be standing in the same spot where historic leaders stood, where events happened, to think about how far we have come in this crazy world.  Because of my negative feelings toward history growing up and my positive feelings now- I made a promise that I would expose my students to tons of neat history and allow them to see how cool history really is.

That's why I'm so excited for a unit we have coming up.  My entire team is going to be doing an interdisciplinary "Cause & Effect" unit and I get to teach all of the 3rd graders about local history. Yay!  My task is to teach them about historic leaders, events, and ideas that have made a difference in the community. Since I'll have each class for 4 days, we're going to focus on 1 each day for 3 days, then have a seminar about which one they felt was most influential.  One day we will be studying the Greensboro Sit-ins.

 I plan to start by showing the kids parts of this video I found on YouTube.  Just a disclaimer - around 1:45, there is some foul language that's important to the story of the Greensboro Four and the civil rights movement, but not necessarily appropriate for all students to hear so please preview this video before showing it to your class and prepare to skip that part if you need to!

We'll talk a lot about what the protesters had to go through, the original four, and their thoughts that they share in this video.

I did also put together a reading passage with some questions that I plan to read with each group though our learning for this week will take place within many discussions.

I actually went ahead and uploaded this to Google Drive so you can use it if you like! You can click this link.

I'm super excited to teach them about something that was such an influential movement that took place just 45 minutes away from their little home town.

Hope you have a great first week back to school after the break!