Department of Defense
Do Dea: Justice and Injustice
In this self-guided unit, you will be exploring the themes of justice and injustice. Included are lessons, self-assessments, background information, and learning activities. At the end of the unit, you will follow the research process to...
Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian Learning Lab: Teaching With Primary Sources
Five lesson plans, complete with videos, primary sources, and document-based questions (DBQ) to encourage students to utilize primary sources and incorporate thinking and writing into daily learning. Topics include: Artifact &...
Other
Reading Quest: Making Sense of Social Studies
Teaching students to read well in areas other than language arts requires teaching and reinforcing the kinds of reading strategies taught here. There are 27 strategies, ranging from brainstorming to word mapping. The site includes PDF...
Smithsonian Institution
Smithsonian: Engaging Students With Primary Sources
This reference guide is designed to highlight the benefits of using primary source materials in any classroom and to provide the teacher with practical suggestions and examples of how to do this. It includes a bibliography and links to...
US National Archives
Nara: Teaching With Documents: u.s. Constitution Workshop
A workshop, appropriate for elementary, middle school, and high school students, through which participants examine a variety of primary documents and their relationship to the U.S. Constitution. This resource provides workshop...
PBS
Pbs Learning Media: News and Media Literacy
This collection, which includes videos, blog articles, student handouts, lesson plans, and tip sheets for families, helps students identify, analyze, and investigate the news and information they get from online sources. Media literacy...
PBS
Pbs Learning Media: News and Media Literacy Collection
This collection, which includes videos, blog articles, student handouts, lesson plans, and tip sheets for families, helps students identify, analyze, and investigate the news and information they get from online sources. Media literacy...
Edutopia
Edutopia: How to Put Self Directed Learning to Work in Your Classroom
Self-directed learning is a natural pathway to deep understanding and efficacy. This article discusses the benefits of self-directed learning, the components necessary for this type of learning, and how to implement it in your school.
PBS
Pbs Learning Media: Learning From the People Collection
The ECHO Collection provides rich, multi-disciplinary educational resources in science, literacy and language arts, fine art, and social studies. The combined skills, experience, and collections of our six institutions provide...
Thinkport Education
Thinkport: A Revolutionary Time
In this activity, students analyze and explain the interrelationships between events in 18th Century Revolutionary Time.
Thinkport Education
Thinkport: Causes of World War I
In this activity, students analyze and explain the interrelationships between events in World War I.
Thinkport Education
Thinkport: Read Like This, Too Central Ideas and Supporting Details
Begin practicing skills that will help identify the central idea and details while reading literary nonfiction.
Thinkport Education
Thinkport: Read Like This: A Strategy for Analyzing Literary Nonfiction
Read, analyze and answer text-dependent questions about several excerpts from a famous slave narrative called The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano.
Other
Harvest
Three modules explain what primary sources are; how to find primary sources in the UIUC archives; how to make sense of a primary source document by examining its creator, the context, and purpose of its creation.
Thinkport Education
Thinkport: Revolution and the Power of Words
A module where students will determine the meaning of unfamiliar terms using prior knowledge, context clues and examination of word parts.
George Mason University
George Mason University: World History Sources: Material Culture: Images
Investigate the meaning of different cultures' images and materials. Learn to examine different questions such as what is the image, what is the meaning, what is the function, and what is the social condition.
George Mason University
George Mason University: World History Sources: Material Culture: Objects
Examine different objects from many different cultures. Learn how to decipher what it is, where it came from, what the function is, and who made or owned the object.
George Mason University
George Mason University: World History Sources: Newspapers
Discover how historians use newspapers and learn about the development of the modern newspaper. Get answers to many questions about different newspapers.
National Endowment for the Humanities
Neh: Edsit Ement: Evaluating Eyewitness Reports
In this lesson, students practice working with primary documents by comparing accounts of the Chicago Fire and testing the credibility of a Civil War diary.
Library of Congress
Loc: Creating a Primary Source Archive: All History Is Local
A lesson plan where students collect local primary documents and examine the interplay between national, state, local, and personal history.
Digital History
Digital History: An Intro to the Study of History: The Four Questions [Pdf]
How does one study history? Find four basic questions that historians use to examine events in an effort to explain them and put them in historical context. By examining the Battle of Lexington and Concord, students can practice using...
Library of Congress
Loc: Change in Early 20th Century America: Doing the Decades
This unit provides a flexible investigative structure for the study of selected themes in U.S. history and culture using the American Memory collections and related resources. Core goals are the development of relationships between...
AdLit
Ad lit.org: Classroom Strategies: First Lines
First Lines is a strategy in which students read the beginning sentences from assigned readings and make predictions about the content of what they're about to read. This pre-reading technique helps students focus their attention on what...
AdLit
Ad lit.org: Content Area Literacy: History
The ability to read historical documents including contemporary explications about societal, economic and political issues provides a direct link to literacy as preparation for citizenship. As in the other disciplines, schools are unique...