Introduction to Teaching Resources
This site features lesson plans and activities designed for multiple grade levels: elementary, middle school, high school, and university classrooms.
Here you will find grade-level specific lesson plans, with descriptive titles, objectives, skills, teachers' background materials, suggested classroom activities, and primary sources linked to handouts and question sheets that can be downloaded for use in your own classrooms.
Tools include guidelines on how to evaluate and use different kinds of documents and evidence in the classrooms and sets of questions for evaluating websites for their credibility as sources of historical content.
All of these materials are available at appropriate reading levels for elementary, middle school, high school, or college level. You can pick a lesson and decide which of the on-line elements to use before sending your students to the site for their own exploration.
There are also links to state and national standards as well as a variety of other teaching-related websites. For a clearing house of national social studies standards, go the the National Council for the Social Studies website, or go to the National Center for History in the Schools. For links to all of the state standards, consult the website of Developing Educational Standards.
Using the site in a teaching credential classroom: For an example of how to use the site with pre-service teachers, see an assignment developed for social science credential classrooms (K-8 and 7-12).