black history unit Archives

My sixth grader has been showing more of an interest in black history lately, which is awesome because I love teaching it! We’re creeping up on the ’20s again, so I thought we’d go back and look at the 1920s during this homeschool year.

The ’20s were pretty great for black history. There were some horrible things happening, due to increased racial tension, but the Harlem Renaissance also took place that decade and that was a milestone era for African-American art.

So I was excited to try the book The 1920s in America: A Decade of Tensions from Kendall Hunt Publishing! It has units on both the racial tension of the 1920s and the Harlem Renaissance! Read on to see how we used this textbook to cover this fascinating period in black history!

For more black history learning ideas, don’t miss our Ruby Bridges unit study and our list of 31 African-American storybooks for kids, including several history picture books!

Disclosure: I received this product in exchange for this post and I was compensated for my time. All opinions are my own and I was not required to post a positive review.

Covering The Racial Tension of the 1920s with Kendall Hunt Publishing

Kendall Hunt is a curriculum company that offers textbooks and unit studies for grades PreK through 12th. There are a TON of resources to look through. Don’t believe me? Stop by and drool over the curriculum catalog. 🙂

The textbook The 1920s in America: A Decade of Tensions, which is part of the William & Mary Center for Gifted Education Social Studies program, is designed for public school education, but I found it to be an easy text to adapt to a homeschool unit.

One of the things I love about the textbook is that it contains a unit about the existing racial tension of the decade before embarking on a discussion about the Harlem Renaissance. We can only appreciate the importance of those artistic achievements if we understand what life was like for many black Americans at the time.

So we began as the unit does: with a look at the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s.

Since we live in the Deep South, we see reminders of the KKK’s influence every now and then. (In fact, they were recruiting in a local neighborhood recently.) While I don’t want to frighten my daughter, I do want her to understand the very real issues that confronted black Americans in the past and still exist today.

After we watched the video about the KKK, we talked a bit about life in the post-reconstruction South for black people. It was pretty grim. Poverty was rampant, jobs were scarce, and racism was everywhere.

As the textbook instructed, we took a look at the black nationalism movement next to discover the rationale for returning to Africa. And, of course, you can’t talk about black nationalism without discussing Marcus Garvey. After we watched a short video about Garvey, it was time to complete the point of view exercise in the textbook. (There are also two essays in the textbook: one written by a leader of the KKK and another written by a proponent of black nationalism.)

As we got a feel for the everyday life of the average black American in the 1920s, we were ready to explore the beauty of the Harlem Renaissance and why it was so important to African-American society.

Exploring the Harlem Renaissance with Kendall Hunt Publishing

We began by watching a short video about the Harlem Renaissance.

I asked my daughter to summarize why seeing the artistic accomplishments of the era would be so impressive to black Americans. Here’s what she wrote:

“The Harlem Renaissance gave the black folks a chance to make something that they would later be proud of. The black people who saw the art by other black people felt a ray of hope.”

Exactly.

To continue the unit, we read the poem I, Too by Langston Hughes, which is quoted in its entirety in the textbook.

Off-topic a bit here, but Langston Hughes is one of my very favorite writers ever in history. Ever.

After we read the poem a few times, we used the included Literature Web printout and the questions in the unit to help examine our feelings about the work.

I loved this exercise, by the way. It’s such a nice method for helping kids to think about the way a poem makes them feel and then analyze those emotions. It’s also a good introduction to recognizing symbolism, something that’s crucial to our understanding of literature.

As she filled in the Literature Web, my daughter started to find deeper meaning in the poem than she originally picked up. It’s amazing that a written work which consists of about 20 lines can say so much.

Of course, I couldn’t let a lesson about the Harlem Renaissance go by without dressing her up – just a little.

Women were extra sharp in those days. So we stopped by Goodwill and picked up a hat with feathers and a long necklace, then paired them with a dress she already had.

Fabulous!

This was a wonderful history lesson – one of my favorites ever in our homeschool. And I really appreciated how the textbook The 1920s in America: A Decade of Tensions helped me organize the lesson and structure it so that it would make the most impact on my daughter’s understanding of American history.

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Get more ideas for teaching history to your kids on my Living History board on Pinterest!

Studying African history has always been important in our family. Over the years, many schoolbooks have omitted or glossed over ancient African kingdoms and we wanted to make sure that our children learn the truth about these civilizations, no matter what.

To start, we focused on the Ancient Egyptian civilization, which is world-famous as a kingdom that prized mathematics, law, agriculture, and writing – among other things. But many school lessons have presented a view of Ancient Egypt that is at odds with what historians have discovered, including what the Egyptians looked like, what they accomplished, and who ruled the kingdom over the years.

So we put together our own lesson about Ancient Egypt history for kids! Read on to learn more about this fascinating and accomplished civilization that you can share with your children!

If you love this unit, be sure to check out our list of must-read black history books for kids!

Ancient Egyptian Architecture

Egypt is probably the best known ancient African kingdom. The main reason for this is that there are so many archaeological sites that testify to what life was like in Ancient Egypt.

We looked at some images of Egyptian ruins to get an idea of the extraordinary accomplishments made in architecture, design, and mathematics by Egyptians. We looked particularly at the Great Pyramid of Khufu and the Abu Simbel temples.

The Great Pyramid, for example, took over 20 years to complete. Its design is so mathematically precise that historians still cannot understand how the Egyptians built it. They even doubt that the same structure could be reproduced today.

The Great Pyramid of Khufu and the Sphinx

Image c/o: Fred Hsu

The Temples at Abu Simbel

Image c/o: Dennis Jarvis

The kids made some miniature models of the Great Pyramid of Khufu out of paper. We got this activity from the book History Pockets: Ancient Civilizations.

To make the pyramids, we simply cut out the paper shapes and then colored them.

Then we folded them on the lines and added glue to make them stand up.

All finished!

As you can tell, this craft was a pretty big hit.

Hatshepsut, the Female Pharaoh

We also learned about the first female Pharaoh, Hatshepsut. Tigger, in particular, was interested to find out about her. We picked up the book African Princess: The Amazing Lives of Africa’s Royal Women and read about her life and reign.

She was truly an incredible woman and ruler. In many art pieces and statues, she is portrayed as a man with a beard. At the time, a female Pharaoh was unheard of and scholars think that the succeeding Pharaohs decided to show her as a man to hide her existence. But a few statues of her exist that show her as a woman.

This one is on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston:

Image c/o: Keith Schengili-Roberts

Hatshepsut was so revered as a Pharaoh that she was buried at her own temple at Deir el-Bahari:

Image c/o: Olaf Tausch

What Did Ancient Egyptians Look Like?

One of the things that has long irritated me about the images of ancient Egyptians in popular culture is that they are often portrayed as being very fair-skinned. I’ve personally seen a lot of children’s history resources use cartoons that show Egyptians as Caucasian people dressed in Middle Eastern attire.

To counter this view, we looked at some examples of ancient Egyptian art that clearly shows ancient Egyptians as brown-skinned people:

Image c/o: Angelfire.com/ky/southernrock

Image c/o: StewartSynopsis.com

We also learned that Egyptians were very fond of jewelry and that both men and women wore it regularly. Women typically wore lots of eye makeup, as well as elaborate collars such as this:

Image c/o: woodsboy2011

In fact, here’s a relief at the Hathor Temple showing the same kind of collar:

Image c/o: isawnyu

Where Was Ancient Egypt?

To give the kids a better idea of how the ancient kingdoms of Africa were situated, we decided to make a simple map of them. We purchased the Discover Africa notebooking set from Balancing Everything and used the blank Africa maps as the basis for our template. (It is a truly wonderful geography unit for all 54 countries on the African continent.)

We began by marking the area covered by Ancient Egypt and we’ll be filling in the map with the other kingdoms we feature.

If you’d like to check out the Discover Africa notebooking set, you can see it for yourself by visiting Balancing Everything or by clicking below:

Books and Resources about Ancient Egypt

Here are the books and resources we used for this lesson.

PBS: Wonders of the African World – This website is based on a PBS series from the 1990s written and narrated by Dr. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Sections cover Egypt, Nubia, and Swahili.