I will be teaching another general high school sociology class in the new year and would like some new ideas to use with my class.  I like to do co-operative learning and other group activities.  I am most interested in hands on type activities rather than more readings.  Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.  If you have any teacher type books posted that might help, I would be glad to check them out.

Hey! I teach anthropology at the college level (I'm an archaeologist..) I know they're not exactly the same, but have you ever done the garbage exercise with kids? (I've always wanted to but I'm afraid college kids would think it was too young for them). have them bring in a bunch of items that would ordinarily be in their wastepaper basket/empty a classroom wastepaper basket(both assuming they're not too gross-i.e., that they actually contain wastepaper. or you could try it with a recycling bin, where things are presumably clean already) or have them make a list of stuff you WOULD find in their garbage at home...and then you can talk about all sorts of things. I.e., socioeconomic class, consumerism, ethnicity, different kinds of nutrition, evidence for how people interact with their neighborhoods(you can tell which stores people shop at regularly by bags and receipts and sometimes the kind of food wrapping they have in their trash), self-report bias on surveys (i.e, if people were asked to report how much pizza they eat in a week, would their trash agree with them? this is actually a study that's been done by an archaeologist named William Rathje). That's just off the top of my head, but you can get creative with it. I don't know if this would help, but it's definitely interactive and it's something I've always wanted to try. Hope this is useful!

What a great idea.  The garbage exercise sounds like fun and what a great way to generate discussion on all the topics you mentioned.  I think I can get my highschool kids to do this ( even though they might do a little whining about how gross it is ).  That's ecactly the type of idea I was looking for.  Thanks a Heap! (no pun intended)