In 1987, Congress passed Pub. L. 100-9, officially designating March as Women’s History Month. In your classroom, you can use this month as an opportunity to go beyond timelines and biographies to engage students with meaningful Women’s History Month activities.
With Formative, you can guide students through speeches, letters, and multimedia texts while collecting real-time data on comprehension, discussion readiness, and written analysis. These activities help you advance historical inquiry, support diverse learners, and make real-time instructional decisions.
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Key takeaways:
The Women’s History Month activities support reading comprehension, text analysis, and evidence-based writing. Each activity is designed for front-of-classroom instruction and gives you immediate insight into student understanding through Formative’s real-time response data.
Students often struggle to connect ideas across multiple sources. This activity helps you explicitly teach synthesis by guiding students through a video, a poem, and a speech, all centered on how women were viewed in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Live responses allow you to pause instruction, clarify misconceptions, or spotlight strong examples for discussion.
Foundational texts can feel distant to students without structured support. This activity helps you slow the reading process and model how to extract meaning from complex language, while reinforcing citation skills.
In Formative, you can see quickly who is identifying key arguments, who needs vocabulary support, and who’s ready to extend their thinking into writing or debates.
Key takeaways:
Students are often more engaged in math practice when problems feel meaningful. This activity connects fraction operations to women from fields such as science, invention, exploration, mathematics, and advocacy.
Each problem includes built-in scaffolds for Grades 3-5. As students work, you can view responses in real time to identify patterns, address misconceptions, and adjust instruction on the spot.
Key takeaways:
These Women’s History Month activities help students examine how women used public speech to challenge laws, influence public opinion, and advocate for equal rights.
When paired with Newsela Social Studies, you can view the full text of each speech right within Formative, and deepen historical context by connecting each speech to background articles, timelines, and leveled readings that support comprehension and discussion.
You can access Newsela Social Studies by starting a free 45-day trial of Newsela Lite, making it easy to build a cohesive lesson that blends primary sources with nonfiction content aligned to your standards.
Truth’s “Ain’t I a Woman” speech helps students examine how personal experience can be used as powerful evidence. As you guide students through Truth’s argument, you can focus on how she confronts assumptions about womanhood and equality in a public forum.
Using Formative, students can respond to text-dependent questions and prepare for discussion while you track which claims and examples they can correctly identify in real time.
Anthony’s speech on women’s suffrage allows students to explore civil disobedience and constitutional interpretation through a historical lens. This is an ideal way to discuss voting rights and advocacy movements.
With Formative, you can collect student responses about Anthony’s reasoning and connect the speech to broader suffrage efforts.
Kelley’s speech highlights how social reform movements often intersect. Students can analyze how labor conditions, gender, and economic equality were linked within her argument.
Formative lets you structure questions that ask students to trace cause-and-effect relationships within the speech while monitoring understanding before moving into small-group or whole-class discussion.
This speech can help students examine how public figures shape expectations for future generations. Earhart’s message is especially effective for connecting history to modern STEM conversations. Pair it with additional articles from Newsela Social Studies or Newsela STEM to explore modern-day developments in these fields.
Steinem’s testimony to the Senate introduces students to legislative advocacy and persuasive speaking. It’s an opportunity to analyze tone, audience, and rhetorical strategy.
With Formative, you can collect written analysis and quickly assess which students understand the amendment’s purpose and historical significance.
Chisholm’s speech to Congress allows students to explore representation and political leadership. Her role not just a citizen speaker, but as a Congress member, adds critical context to discussions of power and access.
Formative helps you track how students connect Chisholm’s identity and position to her argument while supporting discussion readiness.
This modern-day speech helps students connect historical struggles for equality with present-day leadership. It can act as a bridge between historical and contemporary civic engagement.
With Formative, you can prompt students to compare Harris’ remarks with earlier speeches shared in these lessons and assess synthesis across time periods.
Key takeaways:
These Women’s History Month activities help students explore how women used public and private writing to influence political decisions, challenge social norms, and advocate for change.
When paired with Newsela Social Studies, you can view the full text of each letter right within Formative, and make the content more accessible with background articles, historical context, and leveled nonfiction texts that support close reading and discussion.
You can access Newsela Social Studies by starting a free 45-day trial of Newsela Lite, making it easy to connect foundational documents to broader historical narratives and standards-aligned instruction.
These letters give students a glimpse into early conversations about women’s rights at the nation’s founding. They can analyze tone, intent, and response to understand how Abigail Adams advocated for the legal consideration of women.
Using Formative, you can guide students through close reading and text-dependent questions while collecting written responses that reveal their understanding of perspective, power, and historical context.
Grimké’s letter allows students to examine how personal correspondence was used as a tool for advocacy. Her writing connects women’s rights to broader civil rights movements, making it a strong example of how equality movements intersect.
Formative supports structured analysis by capturing student responses to claims and evidence.
This letter introduces students to themes of imperialism, sovereignty, and resistance from a global perspective. Students can analyze how Queen Liliuokalani used formal writing to assert political authority.
With Formative, you can assess students’ understanding of historical context and argumentation in their responses.
Weil’s correspondence shows how persistence and persuasion shaped suffrage campaigns at the state level. Students can examine how tone and audience shift depending on purpose and outcome.
Formative lets you collect student interpretations in real time and identify who is ready to compare Weil’s letters to other suffrage texts.
Designing meaningful Women’s History Month activities doesn’t have to mean starting from scratch. With Formative, you can access free, classroom-ready activities created by curriculum experts and educators like you. Then, you can customize them to fit your students’ needs.
Use the Formative Library filters to browse by subject, grade level, and instructional focus, or build your own activities using Luna AI, multimedia, PDFs, Google imports, and interactive response types. As students work, you’ll collect real-time data that helps you adjust instruction, support diverse learners, and keep discussions moving.
The Formative Library has a variety of free, pre-made activities developed by our curriculum experts and educators like you. You can use these templates as-is or customize them to fit your instructional needs. Use the library’s sort filters to browse content by subject and grade level to find what you want.
Don’t have a Formative account yet? Sign up for Formative for free today to start creating activities for Women’s History Month and beyond!
