Newsela: Newsela is a great website for keeping students up to date on current events. Students can read current articles written at their Lexile level, and many of the articles are available in Spanish as well. Quizzes and writing assignments are available for the articles. Teachers can assign articles to individual students, or assign articles as a class. https://newsela.com/articles/#/rule/latest

National Geographic Education: This site is a great resource for Social Studies. They provide numerous lessons for teachers including videos, topic guides, ideas, activities, games, and lesson plans. National Geographic is also one of the best in the world when it comes to maps. Whether you need a traditional physical or political map or something more advanced like a map of surface air temperature, they have it. There are a lot of creative ways to incorporate Nat Geo into your teaching beyond just big lessons. https://www.nationalgeographic.org/education/teaching-resources/

TEDEd: This is an interesting resource for videos. They have a lot of explainer videos for how and why things happened or are the way they are. Most of the videos are fairly short, so they might be a fun way to break up the day or add a little life to the schools day when students seem disengaged. Also, they would serve as fun ways to engage at the beginning of a lesson. I would suggest having a video selected instead of just pulling up the site. Otherwise, you are going to get a bunch of students yelling at you for which one to choose. https://ed.ted.com/lessons?_=1517720110903&category=social-studies&page=2&student_level=1

iCivics: This is a great resource for civic based lessons. They provide full lesson plans, PowerPoints, videos, and some unique looking games. Instead of just learning how local government works, why not have your students play a game in which they have to manage a local government or get local groups to cooperate with one another. I would suggest previewing the content first as it might skew to older children. https://www.icivics.org

DOGONews: This is a site dedicated to current events tailored for children. You don’t have to worry about what is going to come up. The articles also come with tailored assignments such as comprehension and vocabulary. It is a nice way to add to your reading lessons. https://www.dogonews.com/category/social-studies

PBS Learning Media: Another great professional resource similar to Nat Geo. It’s loaded with videos, articles, and lessons. It’s easy to navigate as well. https://www.pbslearningmedia.org/socialstudies/

Minecraft – Oregon Trail: If you find yourself teaching the Oregon Trail, this is worth looking at. It is a really interesting way to incorporate the topic into Minecraft. There are all sorts of lessons related to the topic. I can’t imagine children won’t love it. https://education.minecraft.net/oregon-trail/

Smithsonian Learning Lab
https://learninglab.si.edu/
The Smithsonian Learning Lab has infinite resources. All you need to do in type in a topic and it connects you with museum artifacts in the form of photos, videos, audio recordings, and learning activities. Teachers can also build collections that include readings, quizzes, discussion questions, and more, although that feature may be best for high school social studies teachers.

Teaching History
http://teachinghistory.org/
This site provides a number of resources and materials related to teaching history. Under teaching materials, you can read and learn about them through the lesson plan reviews. The unique thing about this site is that they offer teaching resources and strategies for ELL students. The site also offers instructional approaches and methods that you can use when teaching social studies. When you go to the history content page, you can search multimedia resources by typing in keywords. The site’s search engine is very sophisticated
because in addition to typing in keywords, you can choose a topic, a time period, and a resource type. Under best practices page, they introduce more teaching techniques, practices, and ideas which the teachers can use in daily lessons.

Teaching Tolerance
https://www.tolerance.org
This is a great free resource to teach both history and current topics. The goal of teaching tolerance is to provide educators with resources to teach and promote social justice. Topics included on the site include: race and ethnicity, religion, ability, class, immigration, gender/sexual identity, bullying/ bias and rights/activism.

American Panorama
http://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/
American Panorama is a project done by the University of Richmond. They have created a number of interactive maps of the USA that would be a great change up from a normal map activity. Some of the maps include, inequality of wealth, movement of
enslaved peoples and immigration of foreign born people. All of these can modified to year, specific area and a few other features specific to each topic. My favorite map was on the different overland trails from 1840-1860. These maps show the movement of people from the midwest to the west coast including those on the Oregon Trail. Each line represents an actual migrant and each stop is accompanied by their journal entry and date.

Education Amplifiers https://new.edmodo.com/groups/education-amplifiers-25408953 Education Amplifiers has loads of content on social justice issues including artwork, worksheets, and full lesson-plans.

PBS Nova
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/
This site offers a lot of videos on different social studies and science topics. The videos are well done, well researched, and about an hour long. The downfall is that you have to pay a subscription to watch unlimited videos. At $6 a month though, it might be worth it.