George Washington's:  Mount Vernon

• FREE, searchable lessons plans on business, farming, government, leadership, legacy, personal, presidency, slavery, war, women - ALL GRADES

Lesson Plans

• Washington's 1799 Will and Testament Concerning National Education - Primary Source Worksheet - GRADES 6-8

Education World:  Holidays / Special Days

• Teaching resources for a wide variety of holidays and celebrations. Here you will also find resources for special occasions such as the 100th day of school, Children's Book Week, Pi Day, and many others.

EDSITEment! (NEH.gov) 

• EDSITEment offers free resources for teachers, students, and parents searching for high-quality K-12 humanities education materials in the subject areas of history and social studies, literature and language arts, foreign languages, arts, and culture.

Constitutional Rights Foundation:  Constitutional Rights Foundation (CRF) seeks to instill in our nation's youth a deeper understanding of citizenship through values expressed in our Constitution and its Bill of Rights and to educate young people to become active and responsible participants in our society.

• The Election of Barack Obama: Webinar and NEW Lesson Plans

  • Webinar

  • Lesson Plans

    • K-2 Plans

    • 3-6 Plans

    • 6-12 Plans

Other Resources

• Untold Stories of American History (Trinity University)

• NY Times Learning

PBS LearningMedia - U.S. History Collection:  IN DEVELOPMENT IN 2022, this Collection is growing all the time! Expand students’ understanding of U.S. History with culturally inclusive resources that bring the major people, events, and trends in history alive, while integrating often untold stories into the curriculum. Curated clips of trusted PBS programs and a diverse array of other media and interactive resources develop students’ historical thinking skills while broadening their appreciation of history’s multiple perspectives and complexity.

iCivics:  We couldn’t be happier that iCivics games are a go-to for so many educators when it comes to engaging students. But did you know we have a wide variety of other resources that are also designed to facilitate interactive learning and meaningful classroom conversations?

• Videos:  Explore our suite of eight animated videos, each about two minutes long, that introduce students to lesser known individuals and groups who have helped shape our nation in insurmountable ways. You can use them to introduce a topic, spark discussion, or create a launchpad for further research.

• DBQuests:  Our DBQuest modules offer historical topically-aligned primary source documents, as well as guiding questions to help students dig into the text. This scaffolded approach helps students build evidence-based reading skills aligned with Common Core.

• Infographics:  From how a bill becomes a law to ranked-choice voting, our downloadable and printable infographics are great to use as a quick stand-alone lesson or easy to integrate with existing content. Find ready-made introductory information, guiding questions, and activity ideas in the Teacher's Guide.

• WebQuests:  These curated collections of web resources empower students to explore civic topics and make connections to the real world. Use them to preview, teach, supplement, or extend classroom teaching and encourage deeper thinking.

SHEG:  The Stanford History Education Group is an award-winning research and development group that comprises Stanford faculty, staff, graduate students, post-docs, and visiting scholars. SHEG seeks to improve education by conducting research, working with school districts, and reaching directly into classrooms with free materials for teachers and students. SHEG’s Reading Like a Historian curriculum and Beyond the Bubble assessments have been downloaded more than 10 million times. SHEG's current work focuses on how young people evaluate online content. SHEG has created a Civic Online Reasoning curriculum to help students develop the skills needed to navigate our current digital landscape.

• Reading Like a Historian:  The Reading Like a Historian curriculum engages students in historical inquiry. Each lesson revolves around a central historical question and features a set of primary documents designed for groups of students with a range of reading skills.

• Beyond the Bubble:  Beyond the Bubble unlocks the vast digital archive of the Library of Congress to create History Assessments of Thinking (HATs). Explore over 130 easy-to-use assessments that measure students' historical thinking rather than recall of facts. 

• Civic Online Reasoning:  Students are confused about how to evaluate online information. We all are. The COR curriculum provides free lessons and assessments that help you teach students to evaluate online information that affects them, their communities, and the world.

California History Social Science Project (UC Davis)

• Lessons by Grade Level (Lessons, essays, and primary source sets for students, organized by grade level)

  • Elementary School

  • Middle School

  • High School

  • Home School (K-12)