Civil Rights in Action~Post #2 Free Timeline Activity

I have updated my Civil Rights Timeline activity. It's a freebie on TPT if you need something engaging for Civil Rights. This mini-research unit takes about a week to complete in my classroom. {If you missed yesterday's post, it contains a Civil Rights Image Gallery activity, another freebie, that is perfect to do prior to the timeline research activity.}

Students research one of 25 events or people from Reconstruction to Civil Rights that help them develop an understanding of why the Civil Rights movement was necessary and what events led to this being a "movement" versus a few small protests. If you know of events you want students to research, you can easily include them in this mini-research project. After all students complete an illustration and summary of their event on the timeline card, we jigsaw the events onto our Civil Rights timelines. (This is one of the aspects of the freebie that I improved--using less pages by omitting years where no events are included in my timeline and stretching out years where many events took place).

I used the African American World Timeline from PBS to create this timeline activity. The website only gives a short description of the event and many of the links within are now unavailable :( So, this week, I had to quickly find other websites that would help students complete their research.

One website that has been popping up when I type "for kids" is ducksters.com. Have you used this website? It seems pretty useful and on a kid-level for research...it was even useful in our biome research during science today. Anywho...here are links to some of the websites we are using:

Freedom: A History of US
Civil Rights for Kids
Civil Rights Events Resources (a few)
Learning History through Art (lots of background)
16th Baptist Church Bombing
Montgomery Alabama bus boycott
Plessy v Ferguson
President Truman's Executive Order
Greensboro Sit-Ins Homepage
Ruby Bridges
Civil Rights Video Links
Ruby Bridges goes to School

Did you know that you can copy and paste links from one webpage to another? If you want these on your own class website, just copy and add! Just keep in mind that I have not explored the sites fully, but believe that the pages I have linked to are appropriate for 4th graders. 

Head over to TPT to download this updated FREEBIE!~~! The download has lots of extras, like a one-page timeline for teacher and/or student reference, a one page Civil Rights vocabulary handout, directions for the teacher, and a list of suggested picturebooks and novels. If you like this activity, show me some love here and on TPT :)