Happy New Year! The Emancipation Proclamation

The Emancipation Proclamation is always fun to learn about at any time of the year, but I always come back to it at the New Year as it officially went into affect on New Year's Day of 1863 after having been proclaimed on September 22, 1862 after the Battle of Antietam.
There are a number of levels at which to teach the Emancipation Proclamation with the most straight forward level revolving around the question, "Did Lincoln free the slaves?"  The Stanford History Education Group (SHEG), which is aimed at helping K-12 teachers and students learn about historical literacy, has a STRONG, QUICK LESSON PLAN that focuses on answering the above question through background, the Proclamation itself, and the opinion of Frederick Douglass, all with guiding questions and a helpful graphic organizer.  SHEG requires a free registration but has a ton of great lessons that will make the registration worth your while.

The other end of the spectrum takes us to the HOUSE DIVIDED and LINCOLN'S WRITINGS resources from Dickinson College, which are built and maintained by Professor Matthew Pinsker and his students.  These resources are also specifically aimed at K-12 teachers and students and helping them understand history and its questions.
In the House Divided, Pinsker has an EMANCIPATION DIGITAL CLASSROOM, which has a slew of resources and links upon links.  Beware, there are so many links that you might find yourself losing hours (In a good way!) before you realize it!  There are timelines and tons of visuals and even a teacher's guide to Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" as well as a DBQ on the Emancipation Proclamation itself.

From Lincoln's Writings, Pinsker has ranked the 150 most teachable Lincoln documents, Numbers 17 and 2 are the first and final drafts of the Emancipation Proclamation.  For both the FIRST DRAFT and the FINAL DRAFT annotated transcripts can be found here, FIRST and here, FINAL, along with audio files, visuals, and close reading videos of the text, context, and subtext of the two documents, here is the video for the FIRST DRAFT and here is the video for the FINAL DRAFT.

Between these two sources are tons of ways of teaching the Emancipation Proclamation at different levels.
Have fun and let me know what you think as Learning is My Business!