The Dan and Lillian King Foundation supported the development of lesson plans for teachers and students to experience ahead of their field Trip. Many teachers have shared their ideas for learning and student works after their trip to see, “Hamilton: An American Musical”. Below you will find strategies for creating mixed-domain learning experiences for middle school teams and intermediate school teachers.
8th Grade Digital Citizenship
Develop learning experiences that help students analyze the ways Hamilton used the communications platforms of his time in his work, career, and personal life.
These ideas for digital citizenship lessons help students consider their own use of social media by comparing Hamilton’s publications to modern media.
Bringing Hamilton into Language Arts Classrooms
Explore poetry, rap, spoken word and other expressive forms of communication to continue to engage with US history and modern voices in middle grade Language Arts Classrooms. Includes ideas for partnering with teachers in other domains.
Language Arts and History: Middle School Team Mini Project ideas
(For Language Arts and Social Studies team teachers. ) Ideas for co-developing lessons together with your middle school team. Strategies focus on helping students to analyze and uncover historical perspectives by studying both the lyrics of Hamilton and historical primary source documents.
Developing Student Performances
Many, many educators who attended the first year field trips have shared with us that their students enjoyed creating performances of their own after their trip to see “Hamilton: An American Musical.” Here are a few of their stories, tips and ideas to help your students create their own follow-up performance.
Sharing the film with students
Monterey County students and teachers will find the film “9,000 8th Graders” streaming at the Internet Archive and over-the-air broadcasting on MCAET TV (Comcast 26 & OTA 38.1 in Monterey County).
The film follows the first year of Monterey County field trips to see Hamilton at the Orpheum Theater in San Francisco, as well as the excitement and challenge that the project provided.
As a learning opportunity, guide student viewers to consider:
- – What big dreams or huge projects would you, as a learner, like to undertake?
- – What challenges must you prepare for?
- – What challenges occurred and were overcome in the film?
- – What is the benefit of being part of such a large scale ambitious project?
Skilled Organizers for any Occas
Share a lesson.
Send an email and contact us about sharing your “Teaching with Hamilton” lesson plan with the 9,000 8th graders community.
“I paired this with our unit on persuasive essays. We broke down Burr’s argument in the song as if it were an essay: his claim, his evidence (the imagery of exclusion), and his call to action (‘I wanna be in the room where it happens’). It made the analysis accessible in a way that a textbook speech never could. They started using the phrase ‘the room where it happens’ to talk about anywhere decisions are made that affect them.” — ELA Teacher, Salinas