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Roots of Democracy
Description
Through a narrative reading, students explore influential individuals and groups that helped shape five key features of American democracy: consent of the governed, representative democracy, rule of law, individual rights, and checks and balances. Students create a timeline of influences and correctly identify examples of the five features of American democracy in action. Finally, students participate in a memory matching game that requires them to match purpose of government terms, definitions, and fill-in-the-blank sentences.
Objectives
Students will be able to
- define the five features of American democracy, infering the definitions from textual context.
- identify key influences on our founding fathers, underlining them in the text and then correctly sorting them onto a timeline.
- differentiate between the features of American democracy, correctly matching them to examples in American government.
Lesson Prep
Step by Step
ANTICIPATE the lesson by asking the following question: “What is democracy? Are we a democracy here in the United States?”
DISTRIBUTE the Principles of Democracy reading (3 pages).
READ through the reading as a class, pausing at the end of each section to complete the step listed there: after the intro, hypothesize as to the definitions of the terms about to be covered, and after each term, define it.
DISTRIBUTE the Principles of Democracy worksheet (1 page).
REVIEW the instructions for the “Mark it up” and timeline activities on the top of the page. **Optionally, you may divide students into pairs to complete the “Mark it up” activity.
INSTRUCT students to complete the activities on the worksheet.
GROUP students into groups of 2 or 3.
DISTRBUTE a set of Principles of Democracy “Matching Activity Cards” to each group of students. (You may need to distribute scissors to each group, unless you have pre-cut the cards).
GIVE students the following instructions: Students will be playing memory. They should mix up the cards and lay them out on a flat surface face down. They are going to create sets of three, by flipping over three cards at a time. They need to create sets that include a term, that term’s definition, and a fill-in-the-blank to which that term is the correct answer. They need to remember where each card is so that they can find it when they need it to create a set of three! When they have created a set of three they may remove it from the playing surface.
REVIEW each term, the correct definition of each term, and the completed fill-in the blank sentence. This may be done before or after your students play the Matching Activity.
Recommended Sequence
Before:
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Blank card