This activity might be set up in your classroom computer center; students will rotate into the activity during the week. Or it will also work nicely as a whole-class activity to be completed in your school's computer center. Students can work independently or in pairs to complete the activity. If they work in pairs, be sure to instruct students on how to take turns; they might do that by alternating responsibility for researching and reading the material at hand and recording answers.
In this activity students will match famous African American men and women to their accomplishments and to the year in which those accomplishments occurred. Students will use the online resources of Encyclopedia Brittannica's Black History Biographies to complete the activity.
This activity is slightly different from the typical two-column matching activity with which students are familiar. In
this three-way matching activity students
first draw a line in from the person's name in the left column to that person's accomplishment (in the middle column);
then they draw a line from the accomplishment in the middle column to the year in which that accomplishment occurred in the far-right (third) column.
We have provided two printable work pages for this activity. One page focuses on famous African American women and
the other highlights the accomplishments of African American men. You might have the boys research the men and the
girls research the women, or vice versa; or you might give students a choice or have them do both activities.
If you find matching activities difficult to grade because the crisscrossing lines students draw are difficult to follow,
you might have students alternate between using a pen and a pencil (draw lines related to number 1 in pen, number
2 in pencil, number 3 in pen…) or you might have students record their responses on the page in number/matching
letter/year format, such as the following:
LANGUAGE ARTS: English GRADES K - 12 NL-ENG.K-12.2 Reading for Understanding NL-ENG.K-12.8 Developing Research Skills NL-ENG.K-12.9 Multicultural Understanding
SOCIAL SCIENCES: U.S. History GRADES K - 4 NSS-USH.K-4.1 Living and Working together in Families and Communities, Now and Long Ago NSS-USH.K-4.3 The History of the United States: Democratic Principles and Values and the People from Many Cultures Who Contributed to Its Cultural, Economic, and Political Heritage GRADES 5 - 12 NSS-USH.5-12 All Eras
TECHNOLOGY GRADES K - 12 NT.K-12.1 Basic Operations and Concepts NT.K-12.5 Technology Research Tools
See more Lesson Plans of the Day in our Lesson Plan of the Day Archive.
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For additional history lesson plans, see these Education World resources:
Three-Way Match: Famous Black Americans