Become a Letters of Hope Classroom

Thanks for considering becoming a CARE Letters Of Hope Classroom! We’ve developed this curriculum as a way to build understanding, empathy and connections between American students and young refugees around the world. We hope you will find it thorough, informative and inspiring as you and your students create a foundation on which to better understand human rights and a global crisis that today finds more than 65 million people forcibly displaced from their homes and countries.

From this page, you can download lesson plans aimed at middle-school classrooms.

Lesson 1: Who is the Refugee? (Part 1)

In this lesson, students will learn the definition of a refugee and what conditions cause a person to become a refugee. They will examine art, either a sculpture or a poem, depicting the plight of refugees.

Lesson 2: Who is the Refugee? (Part 2)

In this lesson students will gain a deeper understanding of the complexities refugees face: deciding to leave their homes, taking risks on the journey to safety, and ending up in a new place with no way of knowing what their future will hold.

Lesson 3: Identifying Rhetoric

This lesson supports students as they examine statements they have read or seen in the news or have heard in their communities and create counterclaims to them.

Lesson 4: Universal Declaration of Human Rights & the Rights of the Refugee

Students will review and reflect on the UDHR as a foundation to better understand the plight of refugees. They will work with a partner to create their own human rights articles and apply them to a working document titled The Declaration of the Rights of the Refugee.

Lesson 5: Refugee Camp Simulation

Students share stories of their peers around the world who are refugees. These firsthand narratives enable students to connect with other youth in their generation who are experiencing the harsh realities of life as a refugee.

Organize Locally

Foster empathy through understanding.