Social Studies
Lesson Plans
Listed below are several web sites that I’ve found that can be very useful for finding lesson plans concerning all the facets of Social Studies such as History and Geography. Any Social Studies teacher at the middle or high school level should be more than able to find some useful material in these sites. I have listed them in order from most useful to least useful. Hope this helps!!!
Dr.
Marty Levine at California State at Northridge: this site is the home page for the Professor Emeritus of
Secondary Education at this branch of the California State University. He has collected an immense variety of
lesson plans from all over the U.S. for the purpose of aiding Social Studies
educators. Lesson plans concerning
everything from Ancient Greece to September 11 and back again can be found
here. His list of links includes lesson
plans from other universities, textbook publishers, and the National Council on
Social Studies. In addition to having
lesson plans, his site includes a section on Teaching Strategies as well as
Newsgroups. I found his section on
Online Activities for students particularly interesting. All in all, this site provided me with the
greatest selection of plans.
http://www.csun.edu/~hcedu013/
Edmund
J. Sass Social Studies Lesson Plans and Resources: this site provides a huge index of lesson plans on many topics in
the Social Studies realm. Lesser known
topics including sociology and multiculturalism can be found here also. The site has an exhaustive supply of lesson
plans concerning history and geography.
Similar to the web site above, this site provides a long list of
resource links that a Social Studies teacher can consult to find more information. He lists the Social Studies standards for
all 50 states on his site as well! This
site is especially useful since it is updated on a fairly frequent basis.
http://www.cloudnet.com/~edrbsass/edsoc.htm
EDSITEment: this site is sponsored by the National Endowment for the
Humanities and has many teacher contributed lessons for grades 9-12 in
abundance. Lesson plans are organized
by how well they overlap the four criterion areas the Endowment has set
up. They include Art and Culture,
Literature and Language Arts, Foreign Language, and History and Social
Studies. So, if you want to find a
lesson plan that includes Art and Culture and Foreign Language, the chart will
show you which plans may interrelate these two areas. Through using this chart, it is easy to find a lesson plan that
can address diverse learning styles as well.
This site would rank higher, but sometimes it can seemingly take forever
to load.
http://edsitement.neh.gov/lesson_index.asp
Columbia
Educational Center: this site provides everything
from mini-lessons to unit plans. Many
of the lesson plans involve a great variety of hands-on activities for students
too! Most of the lesson plans are in
the area of U.S. History and Economics.
There are a few lesson plans on Geography, however. Overall, if you need to find some
interesting lesson plans dealing with the U.S., this site should help you out.
Awesome
Library: this site is not a collection of lesson
plans per se, but provides a host of useful links to other web sites containing
lesson plans and Social Studies resources.
It is organized with links on how to find resources concerning History,
Geography, Economics, etc. I found the
information on using current events in lesson plans to be most interesting and
helpful.
http://www.awesomelibrary.org/social.html
Lesson
Plans Page: this site provides a few hundred lesson
plans for Social Studies that can be used in the middle and high school
grades. It has a good mix of lesson
plans on U.S. History, Diverse Cultures, and Geography. There are a few lessons on Morals and
Sociology as well. However, this site
seems to contain far more lesson plans on other subjects such as Mathematics
and English than Social Studies.
http://www.lessonplanspage.com/SS.htm