We have spent decades working on our Simulation of Congress.  This set of materials provides teachers with directions, resources, and guides to run a complete simulation of the House of Representatives.  Our students have often considered this simulation to be one of the highlights of their school year!  The learning is deep, and often quite meaningful to students.  As teachers, we also enjoyed this unit more than any other.

Way back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, we created Version 1 of this simulation using Apple’s HyperCard program.  Our Simulation of Congress Version 1 had 100+ fictitious Members of Congress for students to portray, a tool for writing bills, the ability to randomly select the Members to be assigned, and other features that only a software program could provide.  We sold a great many licenses for this software.  However, when teaching US Government classes ourselves, we found having our students portray the real members of Congress was better and as online resources became readily available for researching Members and their districts, students learned additional skills.  All of the materials you will find in Version 2 of our product are improvements we’ve made over the past 25.

The Simulation of Congress Version 2 comes with our Analyzing Congress Database Activity which should be used as one of the preliminary lessons.  There’s no need to purchase this additional lesson plan separately.

• Subject Areas: Government, Civics, Social Sciences, Humanities
• Materials Required: Printed copies of the materials we provide, recordings of CSPAN segments or Internet access to stream them.  For the Analyzing Congress activity: A virtual classroom or other screen sharing tool, or a large screen display with a computer.
• Time Needed: Typically 5 to 7 weeks with five hour long class periods per week or a similar block schedule.

Below is an image showing the suggested scheduling of lessons and activities one could use with this unit:

The teaching team that developed this unit had a Science partner with background in advertising.   He suggested that they do a project involving parents that would get families to talk about all of our lessons and what was being taught at school.    This murder mystery party, and the lessons associated with it, is the results of that effort.

The objectives of the unit are simple; provide students with a vehicle for learning about Roman history, modern criminology and forensics, while also improving their writing skills. As an added bonus, you get parent involvement, and hopefully some great Italian leftovers.

If you are worried that the evening won’t go as planned, just remember — it is supposed to be a mystery!   “Wow! What a mystery we have here! Isn’t this great?”  This party has been used over and over again with great success.

This culminating activity includes:

• Social Studies lessons for teaching about the Romans.  (This includes our Connecting Past to Present – The Fall of Rome lesson plan, our Caesar’s Dilemma, and also The Roman Times lesson plan!)
• Science lessons on fingerprinting and other resources.
• English/Language Arts lessons on using “show not tell” language.  Includes our Monster Drawing lesson.
• A complete guide to running a murder mystery party where parents are the suspects and characters involved in the mystery of who killed Caesar during an Italian themed potluck dinner.

There are handouts, complete instructions, scripts and invitations for the party, and more.

• Subject Areas: Social Sciences, Science, Humanities, Language Arts, Math
• Materials Required: All handouts and necessary lesson plans are included.  A shopping list of props and party items is included.
• Time Needed: This is an entire multidisciplinary unit and will require multiple class periods to complete.  The murder mystery is normally a two hour party.