Curriculum Resources
- Current events Resources and Information
- Bringing History Alive through Current Events
- WideOpen School - Social Studies Resources and Lessons
- Best Social Studies Websites for Kids and Teens
- Common Sense Education Top Picks for Social Studies
- Smart History (Seeing America)
- Teaching Tolerance provides free resources to educators—teachers, administrators, counselors and other practitioners—who work with children from kindergarten through high school. Educators use our materials to supplement the curriculum, to inform their practices, and to create civil and inclusive school communities where children are respected, valued and welcome participants.
- The Library of Congress offers classroom materials and professional development to help teachers effectively use primary sources from the Library's vast digital collections in their teaching.
- The Smithsonian
- Smithsonian Education offers a wealth of resources and digital tools support inquiry-based learning and active engagement to spark creativity and curiosity.
- The Smithsonian Learning Lab allows you to create personal collections and individualized educational experiences.
- The digital Game Center of the Smithsonian Science Education Center offers fun experiences for the young STEM learner.
- Smithsonian's History Explorer offers hundreds of free, innovative resources for learning about American history.
- Many museums, cultural sites, and historical sites offer virtual tours and livestreaming. Here are a few, but an internet search will reveal many others:
- The Zinn Education Project promotes and supports the teaching of people’s history in classrooms across the country. They aim to equip students with the analytical tools to make sense of and improve the world today. Their website offers free, downloadable lessons and articles organized by theme (https://www.zinnedproject.org/teaching-materials/explore-by-theme), time period (https://www.zinnedproject.org/teaching-materials/explore-by-time-period), and grade level. The teaching materials emphasize the role of working people, women, people of color, and organized social movements in shaping history: https://www.zinnedproject.org/
- World History For Us All is a national collaboration of K-12 teachers, collegiate instructors, and educational technology specialists. This is a great site for middle and high school teachers to locate powerful, innovative model curriculum. World History for Us All helps students understand the past by connecting specific subject matter to larger historical patterns, and draws on up-to-date historical research.
- The Content, Literacy, Inquiry, and Citizenship (CLIC) Project offers resources for educators to take an inquiry-based approach to learning about various topics including Armenian Genocide, the Bracero Program, Environmental Literacy, and approaches to civic learning (Check with regional leads for additional resources available for online learning).
- The Stanford History Education Group provides free History and Civic materials including lessons, curriculum, and assessments accessible to teachers and students.
- CrashCourse History Channel on YouTube Crash Course believes that high quality educational videos should be available to everyone for free. The Crash Course team has produced more than 15 courses to date, and these videos accompany high school and college level classes ranging from the humanities to the sciences. Crash Course transforms the traditional textbook model by presenting information in a fast-paced format, enhancing the learning experience. With hundreds of millions of views on our YouTube channel, Crash Course has a worldwide audience in and out of classrooms. While the show is an immensely helpful tool for students and teachers, it also has a large viewership of casual learners who seek out online educational content independently. It has changed attitudes towards education by creating a community of learners who are looking for more than just help passing a test.
- Oyez is a resource for teaching Supreme Court Cases that includes the case history, relevant precedent, arguments, and the Supreme Court Decision and applicable dissents.
- The National Archives features a website that is easy to navigate and includes lots of teacher resources. They feature a daily historical document relating to an event from that day in history. The online catalog can be searched using keywords, and 100 "milestone" documents are identified as significant to American history.
- DocsTeach is full of activities for educators. The documents are organized by different periods in American history. If you're teaching "Civil War and Reconstruction" or "Revolution and the New Nation," just click on the topic to find hundreds of primary source documents. DocsTeach provides audio, video, charts, graphs, maps and more.
- Spartacus Educational is a resource for global history. It contains free encyclopedia entries that directly connect to primary source documents, making it a useful tool for educators looking to give students a starting point in their research.
- Google and Life Magazine have a search engine that lets users search millions of images from the Life Magazine Photo Archive. Users can type in key terms to guide their searches, look through images organized by decade (1860s through 1970s), or significant people, places, events or sports topics.
- Ducksters Education Site (History and Geography)
- "This Month in History" newsletter (free subscription)