The Legislative Branch (Article I)

The through-line

How are the American people represented in Congress, and how does Congress turn representation into law?

Content overview

Article I from the inside out: how Congress is organised, how districts are drawn and contested, who leads and who represents you, what powers the Constitution grants and forbids, how a bill actually becomes a law, what makes the Senate different, and how North Carolina's own General Assembly compares.

How to use the lesson pages

• Eight lessons, each teaching one concept: 1 Article I and the organisation of Congress, 2 gerrymandering and representation, 3 leadership and committees, 4 the powers of Congress, 5 how a bill becomes a law, 6 the filibuster and the job of a member, 7 North Carolina's General Assembly, and 8 review and the unit test.
• Every lesson offers three tracks — Honors, Standard, Foundational — selectable on the page. All three share the same objective and the same key questions and run the full period; what changes is scaffolding, pace, and how much a student reads and produces alone. The quiz on Lesson 4 and the test on Lesson 8 are identical across tracks; only the support around them changes.
• Each resource has one home. The source ran the "How Congress is Organized" deck on three days, the Powers of Congress notes on two, the bill-becomes-law material on two and the HR 6201 assignment on three. One split is deliberate: that organisation deck covers both chamber structure and congressional leadership, so Lesson 1 teaches its structural slides and Lesson 3 its leadership slides.
• There are no dates and no per-period notes. The source carried "Tomorrow's Quiz", "Period 3, 4 already completed" and "1st only"; the substance survives, the scheduling does not.
• Material the source itself had not committed to stays marked that way. Day 6 carries an explicit "Extras — Not For this Year" block, Day 7 notes "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington - Probably Not", and one document is pencilled in as "Tomorrow? (Maybe at end?)". Those sit in each lesson's extras with the hesitation intact rather than being promoted into a timed sequence.
• Standards are the weak point of this unit and deserve your eye. The source page lists none at all — Day 4's "Objectives: 6.1, 6.2, 7.1, 7.2, 8.4" are textbook section numbers, not NC codes. A legislative-branch unit belongs mostly to the CL.C&G.1.x and 2.x standards on the structure and function of government, and those could not be verified from any source in this repo. Rather than invent codes or stretch unrelated ones, a standard appears only on lessons where a verified code from the Unit 1 and Unit 3 pages genuinely fits; the rest carry none. Worth filling in against the official standards document.
• Two lessons touch live partisan arguments — gerrymandering on Lesson 2 and the filibuster on Lesson 6. Both are written as analytical, position-with-reasons work that requires engaging the strongest opposing case, and both note that the two major parties have used and objected to these tools depending on who held the majority.