Looking for a way to celebrate women’s history month in the classroom?
For Women’s History Month, TwHP has posted a set of lesson plans designed to help educators of students in upper elementary grades to high school use these sites to teach about women’s lives in the past. The National Park Service’s Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) program “uses properties listed in the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places to enliven history, social studies, geography, civics, and other subjects.” Created by NPS interpreters as well as preservation professionals and educators, the lessons — which cover subjects from the Homestead Act to domestic service to the Civil War and Civil Rights — are “free and ready for immediate classroom use by students in history and social studies classes.”
Wish you had a lesson plan about a site closer to home, wherever that may be? You can create your own, and add to the body of esson plans available to educators nationwide. The TwHP website includes an “Author’s Packet” that aims to help people develop their own lessons based on the TwHP template. Included are instructions to help authors conceptualize, develop and propose their lessons for inclusion in the TwHP program. To get started, browse the database of sites in your area that are already listed in the National Register of Historic Places. Which help tell stories of women’s lives in the past? Where are those stories foregrounded, and where are they present but hidden, just waiting to be brought forward?