Any day 1 lesson—regardless of the topic—should align with and introduce goals, objectives, and essential questions for a larger unit of study. Using a backwards design approach to developing curriculum, creating individual lesson plans comes after you have determined what you want students to know and be able to do throughout the unit. A good day 1, therefore, necessitates a significant amount of planning beyond the opening activities. Some sample objectives and questions for a unit of study on World War II might include: Why, after the costs of World War I, did nations choose to fight another World War? Why were the civilian costs of World War II so much higher than World War I? Why were the allies victorious?

In addition to introducing the unit, you might consider using part of the first day to investigate what your students already understand—or misunderstand—about the war, introduce key vocabulary for the unit, or preview a timeline of events that you will be studying.

You could also focus an opening lesson on investigating the origins of the war. Activities for this approach might include a multi-media slide lecture on the long and short term causes of the war, an examination of primary documents such as the Treaty of Versailles, excerpts from newspaper reports on German, Italian, and Japanese aggression, or parts of important speeches made by world leaders in the years prior to the war.

Another approach is to begin by considering the significance of the war. To do so, you could examine some statistics that indicate the enormous human cost of the war, or introduce ways that the war fundamentally changed the United States and the world. On a smaller scale, ask students what their family history is with the war and whether the war holds any significance for their family’s story.

There is no shortage of lesson plans and curriculum materials for World War II online. PBS, for example, includes several lessons to accompany Ken Burns' critically acclaimed documentary, The War. The California Department of Education's Course Models contain background information and activities for each of the state's standards, including materials on the war. And, National Geographic’s Xpedition archive includes several lessons on the war. The quality of lesson plans posted online, however, varies wildly. Consider using our rubric for evaluating lesson plans to help you make your choice.

Explore these resources for inspiration, then make some choices. Good luck!

There are many factors to consider when planning instruction. It is great to see that you have your students in mind, as they are central to this process. Knowing your students’ range of skills and interests should help you select and prepare materials and design instruction and assessments.

When developing a unit of study, begin with determining what you want your students to know and be able to do. What are the key concepts, main ideas, and essential content related to 19th century imperialism? What are the skills students should develop? What central questions can help you organize these skills and content? How will you assess student learning? Some of this approach to unit planning, you may recognize as "backwards planning", Grant Wiggins’ useful approach.

Arizona’s state standards can help you get started in making these decisions. The four 7th grade performance objectives provide the following topics for study:

• the causes of European imperialism;
• the impact of European imperialism around the world;
• the rise of Japan as an industrial power;
• and the expansion of American foreign policy at the beginning of the twentieth century.

The standards also provide some guiding details to begin formulating objectives. These include:

• a list of three primary causes of European imperialism, and details about:

1. the impact of imperialism in Africa, India, China;
2. America’s involvement in the Spanish-American War;
3. the Boxer Rebellion;
4. the Panama Canal, and
5. the annexation of Hawaii.

Arizona’s standards document can also help determine the types of skills you might focus on in this unit—for example, analyzing cause and effect, considering the reliability of primary sources, describing multiple perspectives on the same historical event, interpreting historical data, and constructing time-lines, charts, graphs, and narratives using historical data and evidence.

Wow, that is a lot! Your instructors seem to be on target with the idea that you will have to pick and choose your focus and content. It is better to choose fewer topics and to study them in depth, than simply cover all the material in a short period of time. Likewise, it is better to focus on a few skills so students get many opportunities to learn and practice those skills.

It is important to develop your own content knowledge in order to develop unit objectives. Expanding your own understanding of imperialism will help you prioritize which standards to focus on. Several on-line sources can help with this process. World History for Us All, for example, includes an excellent overview of Industrialization and Imperialism in its introduction to Big Era 7.

The American Historical Association provides a teaching module on imperialism with essential questions, concepts, events, people and links to primary source materials

Create assessments to help you make these difficult choices. Following a backwards design approach, after you have determined objectives, consider how students will demonstrate what you want them to learn. The skills described in the Arizona standards provide some suggestions here. Further, creating a final assessment for the unit, as well as formative assessments that are aligned with the unit objectives will help you organize instruction and stay focused on student learning. For the final assessment, students could write an essay in response to a central question that demands that they use the unit’s concepts and texts to make an argument. For formative assessments, think mini-quizzes, exit slips, free-writes, and homework assignments.

Create a unit calendar once you have selected objectives and assessments. This is an iterative process that will include several drafts. Begin by organizing your learning objectives and assessments by days of instruction. To guide this work, consider how learning objectives relate and build off of each other. You can then fill out the calendar with materials and instructional activities. There are several places you can search on-line for primary documents related to imperialism. The Modern History Sourcebook’s imperialism page is a good place to get started. Consider a variety of approaches when developing lesson plans—for example, lectures, timeline activities, “opening up the textbook,” analyzing primary documents, historical inquiry, perhaps a structured academic controversy—and make sure your lessons clearly relate to the unit’s objectives. The National History Education Clearinghouse’s “Best Practices” tab contains helpful suggestions for each of these strategies.

When developing instructional strategies and materials, it is crucial to keep the interests and skills of your students in mind. Working with struggling readers should not preclude using an array of thought provoking documents and activities. These materials, however, need careful structuring and scaffolds; moreover, you will need to excerpt documents strategically and, in some instances, modify them so that they are accessible to the students in your classroom. For suggestions on adapting primary documents, see this NHEC teaching guide. The Historical Thinking Matters module on the Spanish American War provides a good example of using modified documents and structuring historical inquiry. See also, the Stanford History Education Group’s lessons on American Imperialism.

Finally, there are several units on imperialism posted on-line. Be wary as the quality of these materials varies wildly. However, you might check out the Age of Imperialism unit posted by the University of South Florida as a reference, for it includes many elements of unit design described here.

Good luck!

This question is a little more complicated than it appears on the surface. For instance, Germany and Japan were not formally allied in 1937 (the Tripartite Pact allying Germany, Japan, and Italy went into effect in September 1940), and the 1937 action in China predated by two years Germany’s 1939 entry into World War II.

Likewise, historians usually consider the Winter War fought between Russia and Finland from 1939 to 1940 separate from the Second World War; in any case, it occurred well before the United States and Russia were allied, which did not occur until December 1941. (At the time of the Winter War, Russia and Germany had signed a non-aggression treaty and would remain in a state of uneasy neutrality until the German invasion of the Soviet Union in July 1941).

Lieutenant General Lesley McNair was indeed killed by United States Army Air Force bombs in July 1945 as part of Operation Cobra, the breakout from the Normandy beachheads following the June 6, 1944, D-Day invasion. Along with Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner (killed by Japanese fire on Okinawa in 1945), General McNair was the highest-ranking American officer killed during the war.

In a larger sense, the question speaks to the confusion and chaos that forms an inevitable part of battle, and to the mistakes that confusion creates. Fratricide (the accidental targeting of friendly soldiers) has bedeviled armies for centuries. The development of gunpowder and firearms, which increased the distance between forces on the battlefield and thus expanded the chances for miscommunication, misidentification, and mistargeting in combat, increased the incidences of battlefield fratricide.

The advent of long-range artillery and air power in the 20th century created still more opportunities. So-called “friendly fire” episodes reflect not soldiers’ incompetence, carelessness, or treachery but the impossibility of determining precisely what is going on and who is who in the lethal and confusing environment of battle. In the 19th century, the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz termed this confusion and ambiguity the “fog of war,” and it constitutes an unavoidable part of warfare.

Military history features many famous instances of fratricide. Confederate General Thomas J. Jackson was shot by friendly pickets as he reconnoitered after the battle of Chancellorsville in 1863. In May 1940, three German bombers attempting to strike a French airfield became lost and instead bombed the German city of Freiburg by accident.

Scores of American GIs during the Second World War wrote of being strafed by American or British aircraft, being the targets of their own artillery shells (often fired from miles behind the front), or accidentally receiving fire from adjacent friendly units. Increasing distance between combatants, the impossibility of perfect communications, and more frequent actions at night have all made distinguishing friend from foe more difficult.

Amidst the chaos and terror of combat, even the most capable and well-intentioned soldiers sometimes mistakenly target their own troops. Nor have technological innovations such as night-vision goggles and precision munitions eliminated the threat of fratricide in combat. The 2004 death of Army Ranger and former NFL player Pat Tillman during a firefight in Afghanistan from rounds fired by fellow American soldiers is perhaps the best-known recent example.