The Illustrated Bill of Rights

California Standard 12.5: Students summarize landmark U.S. Supreme Court interpretations of the Constitution and its amendments.

Students, over the course of two weeks, are taught the Bill of Rights to include real life examples of their application by the Supreme Court. Groups of 2-3 students are then assigned an amendment or a clause of an amendment to explain and illustrate with a scene they act out themselves or with a video clip downloaded from the Internet. The scenes would be video taped/filmed.

Students who are assigned the fourth amendment might write a scene in which one of them reads and gives a verbal explanation of its meaning. The students then might act out a situation in which one of them plays a police officer attempting to search the other student's house. The homeowner would refuse unless the officer supplied a warrant.

The scenes would be short. Digitally filmed scenes would be downloaded and saved on a computer.

In the next phase of the project, students would learn the basics of PowerPoint and be assigned to produce a two to three slide presentation with the exact wording of their amendment on one or two slides and their video attached or a hyperlinked to a video clip on the Internet.

The presentations would be linked together and shown to the whole class. With class approval, the finished project could be shared with another American Government class.