For my teaching project I decided to create a 7^th grade social studies unit that focused on educating the students about homelessness. the name of the unit is Homeless are people too. It is a 12 day lesson plan that spans over 4 weeks. Here is a sample of a few of the days:

Day one:

• Introduce the word homeless, ask them what they think it means and write their answers on the board.
• Have them write in graphic organizer what makes where they live home, what they like about it. Once they are finished with that we would do either think pair share or just go around the room and share what they wrote.
• Hang those on our bulletin board and then ask them what they would do if they had none those things?
• And have them write a reflective 1-page paper on that topic in their daily journal.

Day two:

• Would begin the class going over our writing assignment and having each student share one thing that they wrote.
• I would then show a power point presentation about 5 or 6 people in history who have similar lives and but half would be homeless and the other wouldn’t
• They would not know this so I would have them get together in groups try to guess which ones were homeless and which were not. The objective here would be to get them to see that homeless people could be anyone.
• For homework I would have them read “homeless” by Anna Quindlen and write a response to it in their daily journal

Day three:

• Review the article, have a discussion about their responses to it. This will lead into-
• Start talking about the different definitions of homelessness, what it means to be homeless, present a power point to the class on all of the different ways to be homeless- couch surfing, shelter living, on the street, doubling up etc.
• Split them up into groups and have them make a poster board about each of the different ways to be homeless. Have them do a little extra research on the topic they are assigned we will pin these up around the classroom.
• For homework write a response to the class in their journal.

Day four:

• Review the different definitions of homelessness and finish the posters if they are not already done.
• We would then watch a few clips of videos off of the invisible people website, stories of some homeless people and I would have them write down observations about each person and specifically focus on why each person was homeless.
• We would then share those ideas and write all of the reasons they observed in the videos on the board.
• For homework I would give them two or three more personal stories about homeless people to read and they would have to come back and be able to tell the class who the people they read about were and why they were homeless and have written that up as well. (In their daily journal)