Civil Rights Movement

Civil Rights Movement Worksheets and Activities

We have a number of Civil Rights Movement resources that are currently free!  Some of the Civil Rights Movement pdfs include worksheets and activities about the Key Events of the Civil Rights Period, events leading up to the Civil Rights Movement, Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott. Plus, explore some challenging terms like Rights, Privileges, Equality, Fairness, Groups, Discrimination, Bias, Prejudice, Stereotypes and more.

I made these Civil Rights worksheets and activities when the kids were younger and wanted to share them with you again today. Many of these are currently free resources!

Key Events of the Civil Rights Period

This is a packet on the main events of the Civil Rights period that I made for the kids to add to their history notebook. I wanted them to have a visual way to remember many of the events we’ve read and studied about over the last four or five weeks. We sat together and went over the key events as we read many of the books in this unit. We’ve read more than 25 books! I’ll list them for you below. The kids were really amazed that the photos were of real events.

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The first five pages goes over some of the main events of the Civil Rights period such as:

• Emmett Till
• Rosa Parks
• Montgomery Bus Boycott
• Little Rock 9: Little Rock Central High School
• Greensboro Sit-Ins
• Ruby Bridges attends a new elementary school
• Civil Rights Act of 1964
• Freedom Rides
• George Wallace, Alabama’s governor gave an inauguration speech: Segregation now! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!
• Letter from a Birmingham Jail
• Birmingham campaign
• Children’s Crusade (Birmingham)
• March on Washington
• Birmingham Bombing
• JFK killed
• Martin Luther King, Jr. given the Nobel Prize
• Selma
• Voting Rights Act
• Martin Luther King, Jr. assassinated
• Civil Rights Act of 1968

You can download this packet for free.  It is eight pages long. If you find it useful, I’d love to hear from you!  ? Liesl

Civil Rights Unit Notebook Pages:

Civil Rights Movement Worksheets – Main Events of the Civil Rights Period (Currently FREE)

The packet has a worksheet to match some of the photos of these famous events with the name:

There are just three pages where the kids had to write or do anything (the bottom three photos above).  They did page on “What are these Civil Rights Moments?” on the last day of our unit.  They wrote out their own explanations of some of the Civil Rights events (middle page) and they did a short writing assignment on Ruby Bridges after we talked about Norman Rockwell’s famous painting. The kids were amazed that the painting was installed at the White House just a few years ago in 2011. We looked at a photograph of President Obama with (adult) Ruby Bridges in front of the painting which now hangs in the hallway outside the Oval Office.

Photo Courtesy of Wikipedia Commons

Civil Rights Timeline Activity

I created a photo timeline of events to help my kids review (and/or understand) the events leading to the Civil Rights Movement. We spent the week really going over that material. The packet goes over the basic history of slavery and post slavery events. Some of the topics we reviewed included…

the first slaves (Jamestown) picking tobacco

• • • Slave Trade
    • the Declaration of Independence and Constitution (and the fact that slavery was not addressed)
    • Cotton and Plantation Life
    • Black Codes
    • Civil War
    • 13th, 14th, 15th Amendments
    • KKK
    • Separate but Equal (Plessy v Ferguson)
    • Jim Crow Laws
    • Segregation

Not only did we go over the notebook pages (below), but we also pulled out the resources we used last year. We pulled out the notebook pages on the Constitution (which is in our Civics and Government Packet)  to make sure they remembered some of the details about that. Last spring, we spent quite a lot of time going over the Transatlantic Slave Trade. (You’ll find a list of books we read and notebook pages the kids added to their history notebooks last semester at that post.)  Plus, we read a few chapters from one of our history books.

Here is a collage of the notebook pages I made for their history notebooks. The photo timeline covers the topics I mentioned above. You can download this photo timeline with the link below. It is currently free. It is 13 pages.

Photo Timeline of Events Leading to the Civil Rights Movement: (Currently FREE)

Civil Rights Movement Timeline Activity:

The kids spent a couple of days making their own timelines. Several pages in the packet above include just photos of the events. My kids made their own long timeline and  used the photos in their project. (They are included in the packet above, but not shown in the photo collage.)

I made a quick timeline to show them how you can block out time periods to show how long something lasts. (For example having a line from 1861 to 1865 to show that the Civil War lasted for 4 years.)

ED did a simplified version of the timeline, just cutting out the pictures and pasting them on to her timeline.

The other two wrote out more dates and added in information.  I guess I didn’t take a picture of LD’s timeline, but you can see DD’s timeline in the orange below:

Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott – (Currently FREE) You will find material on Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott at this post.

Civil Rights Books and Movies my kids ♥ loved!

Every year since 1976, every U.S. president has designated February as black history month. We have just about finished up our unit on the Civil Rights Movement and I have a couple more posts to share with you.

Last week, we learned about the challenges young blacks faced when they attended all-white schools in the late 1950s and early 1960s. We first learned about the Little Rock Nine.  Then, the kids and I read two books about Ruby Bridges, the first black child to attend the all-white elementary school, William Frantz Elementary, in New Orleans.  Both books were wonderful: The Story Of Ruby Bridges and Through My Eyes (affiliate links)

We also spent two days watching Disney’s Ruby Bridges (affiliate links). We read a portion of, Through My Eyes, each day before we watched the movie.  Since there were sections written by Ruby’s teacher, the psychologist who visited her and others it really added a lot to our studies. All three of my kids (5, 8, 10) loved the movie and learned a lot from it.  ED said she loved the movie! We definitely had a lot of great discussions about why people were so cruel, how brave Ruby was and how lonely she must have been being the only child in her classroom throughout her first grade year.

We also read a couple of books about the Greensboro Sit-Ins. After reading these two books, I didn’t feel like we need to go into much more detail about the sit-ins.

We also read the non-fiction book Selma’s Bloody Sunday, The marches and protests in Selma grew out of voting rights movement and the effort to register African-Americans to vote. Some say that these marches and protests were the emotional peak of the Civil Rights Movement. This book tackled some of the violence in a way that the fiction books we have read together did not.  My older two were ready for a book with details like this; my younger one did not read this one with us.

We also read Child of the Civil Rights Movement which was written from a little girl’s perspective. Her family traveled down Alabama to participate in the Selma to Montgomery march. It did not touch on the violence that had occurred.

We read the book above just prior to watching the movie, Selma, Lord, Selma. This movie was also based on a true story and it did a great job depicting the march from Selma to Montgomery.

European History Packet 1500-1750 – Quick Preview  of what is included.