World Wide Web: Celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month 9-15 – 10-15-2012

From diversitystore.com

This World Wide Web post is designed to get you familiar with web sites offering ideas and resources for teaching and Celebrating National Hispanic Heritage Month coming up soon in September.

Education World’s Web site offers some quick ideas for classroom activities pertaining to Hispanic Heritage, including Geography (particularly important if you live in the Southwest); Language, many English words are similar to or derived from Spanish; Art, giving students a feel for Hispanic types of art; Research and Writing skills, asking students to research and prepare a Biography of a famous Latin American author, leader, artists, activist ; and many more classroom ideas. At the bottom of this web site there are a number of links to other useful internet resources to use during Hispanic Heritage Month.

Scholastic has a great web page for celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month. It includes a neat interactive map and timeline of some key Hispanic locales (i.e. California, New York, Florida, Central/South America, Puerto Rico, Cuba, Dominican Republic). Interactive biographies of important Latin Americans (including Ellen Ochoa, Pat Mora and others). Other sections include famous historical figures, a Pinata Concentration Game and a very neat feature on What My Heritage Means to Me, where they have statements from famous and non-famous Hispanic-Americans on what their heritage means to them. This is a great segue into having your students write about what their heritage (Latin or not) means to them. You can find the complete Scholastic Teacher’s Guide here.

And then we come to UNM’s own RETANET: Resources for Teaching about the Americas. As part of a summer institute in 1995, (I know it’s a little outdated, but the ideas and suggestions are still applicable) secondary teachers came together and created 65 lesson plans for teaching about Latin America in the classroom. Lesson plans span the school grades/ages and include everything from history, social studies and art, to cooking, language, science, literature, geography and more. Yes, I’m touting our own horn, but RETANET really is a great resource for teachers from all subjects looking for new, or to improve their own, Latin American lesson plans.

Let’s spend 9/15-10/15/2012 teaching our youth about all of our wonderful neighbors, both to the south and next door to their house!

May buy a Pinata for the heck of it,

Ailesha