Looking for classroom resources and ideas for teaching about the Declaration of Independence, Constitution or the Bill of Rights? Teachinghistory.org’s September 2011 issue of History Education News provides resources to incorporate these important documents into your curriculum and to teach them using new and effective strategies. In this latest issue you will find:

• Do I Have a Right?, an engaging online game developed by iCivics, designed to teach students about the Constitutional amendments. To play, each student joins a law firm specializing in constitutional law and gains points for each client they take on and case they win.
• In Ask a Historian we address the question: James Madison proposed twelve amendments to the Constitution, but only ten were approved. What were the two that were not?
• Ideas for exploring the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights in Charters of Freedom, a National Archives website. Related documents and scholarly articles accompany high-resolution images and transcriptions of each document.
• Links to video provided by WestEd of eleventh-grade students engaged in the question of whether the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II was constitutional.

History Education News is published twice a year to provide K-12 educators with a focused look at the resources, tools and methods available at the teachinghistory.org website. To help make a teacher’s job easier, each issue focuses on a specific theme in order to pull together in one place the history content, teaching materials, best practices, research, and digital technology that teachers can apply readily in their history classroom. Past issues can be viewed at teachinghistory.org/outreach.

To request a single copy or multiple copies of this free publication, please visit teachinghistory.org/materials-request or contact us toll-free at 866.539.8381.

Teachinghistory.org, a project of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, is a leader in helping K–12 history teachers access resources and materials to improve U.S. history education in the classroom. Funded through the U.S. Department of Education Office of Innovation and Improvement’s Teaching American History (TAH) program, teachinghistory.org builds on and disseminates the valuable lessons learned by more than 1,000 TAH projects designed to raise student achievement by improving teachers’ knowledge and understanding of U.S. history.