African American History

Currently the teaching of African American history in itself is not a major part of my fourth grade curriculm. But, I find it virtually impossible to teach a room full of students without touching on the subject at least a few times a year due to questions or current events. I cannot say that we do a large unit on slavery in fourth grade, but due to the fact that Kansas is a large part of the standards in fourth grade we do teach it to an extent due to the large part that slavery played in the early days of Kansas. We talk about the different views that people had of African American's during the period of the 1860's. We also talk about the time of civil rights. We compare how people viewed African American's during this time versus the Civil War time period. We talk about how these events affect them today and what they think about the things that happened to African Americans in history. African American history is taught more in fifth grade, so I just give an intorduction to this part of history.