Project Spotlight
Lincoln Lesson Plans [IL, NE]
Teachers from Teaching American History (TAH) Grants across the country have written to share individual lesson plans on Abraham Lincoln. From working with primary source documents such as the Gettysburg Address to examining Lincoln and popular memory, these plans encompass a variety of perspectives and grade levels.
From the American History Teachers' Collaborative in Urbana, Illinois, Christine Adriane shares Chic, Virginia and Mr. Lincoln: Understanding Historical Perspective. Adriane focuses on the exploration of multiple perspectives, including primary sources, historical books, and national sources, to encourage students to form their own understanding and point of view about Lincoln. The assignment for this five-lesson sequence is to write and perform a monologue; the teacher, students, and the individual student join in assessing the project through an evaluation rubric.
The Omaha Project offers an extensive online archive of lesson plans in addition to templates for designing them and a rubric for evaluation. Research papers provide substantive background information on topics in the curriculum such as Westward Migration in Canada and the United States, Slavery, and Government Reaction to the Great Depression, among others.
The Lesson Plan Abraham Lincoln, the Election of 1860, and Secession (1858-1861) is a 13-section curriculum guide. The document includes text and image primary sources, PowerPoint presentations, and a bibliography necessary to understand and implement the lesson.
Using the site search function also brings up Comparing Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation (1862) and Alexander II's Emancipation Manifesto (1861). This high school lesson plan, uploaded as a Word document, introduces discussions requiring students to define what primary source documents are and how to evaluate them, links to the two documents under comparison, and poses questions to guide the analysis.
