Larry Ferlazzo’s Websites of the Day…

Hispanic Heritage Month begins on September 15th. I never knew the reasons for the date before, but Infoplease says it’s “the anniversary of independence for five Latin American countries—Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua. In addition, Mexico declared its independence on September 16, and Chile on September 18.

I thought another “The Best…” list would be in order. We teach a Latino Studies unit each year in our ninth grade English classes, and you can find the sites on this list, and many more, on my website under Latin Studies.

Here are my picks for The Best Resources For Hispanic Heritage Month (not in an order of preference). All of them provide similar resources — accessible biographies of Hispanic-Americans, history, multimedia, etc, so I’m not going to include a description for each one::

Biography Channel Hispanic Heritage

Smithsonian Institution’s Ojos

CNN Special Report: The Hispanic Experience Today

Scholastic’s Celebrate Hispanic Heritage

Smithsonian Latin Center’s Kids Corner

Teaching Tolerance has a good collection of lesson plans at The ABC’s Of Latino Heritage Month.

Scholastic also has a website they developed with the Hispanic Cultural Center of decent, though certainly not “cutting-edge,” lesson plans for celebrating Hispanic Heritage called Dare, Dream, Do. The same site also has additional lessons recognizing other cultures.

The Smithsonian has just unveiled their online Smithsonian Hispanic Heritage Cultural Tour. it’s a pretty neat multimedia site, which includes a lot of interactivity. In fact, users can create their own personalized tour.

Feel free to share your suggestions of additional resources.

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