Cartoons for the Classroom is a great resource that I discovered on Jeffrey Hill’s blog. Cartoons for the Classroom is a service of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. Cartoons in the Classroom offers more than one hundred lesson plans based on editorial cartoons created by the members of the AAEC. Each lesson plan is available as free pdf download. As you might expect most of the lessons deal with current political and economic topics, but you will also find some lessons that are not time sensitive.

In addition to lesson plans Cartoons for the Classroom provides links to other cartoon resources. One of those resources is the Opper Project. The Opper Project provides lesson plans for teaching history through editorial cartoons.

Applications for Education
Editorial cartoons can make some of the most complex topics accessible to all learners. For example the lesson about the world’s current credit crisis, Tooning Into the Banking Crisis (click to download), is a lesson that I can use with my honors level students as well as with my students that struggle with basic English composition. The cartoon will be used in my honors class to discuss some of the deeper implications of the credit crisis. At the same time the cartoon will expose my struggling readers to an important current events story.