Many teachers avoid bringing current events into the classroom and often for good reason. It's a politically fraught world these days and you don't want to be considered biased or bring up trouble. Some parents are ready to pounce on you for anything.

It's understandable to want to stick to your standards. However, current events are a great way to connect your curriculum to the real world and work on social studies skills.

Incorporating current events into your social studies lessons can also be a great way to engage students and help them see the relevance of the subject to their own lives.

There's many great resources available to you from CNN10 to the Donut that are made specifically for classrooms. 

So, I encourage you to try - when relevant - to bring some current events into your lessons. 

Here are five simple tips for using effectively covering current events in your classroom:

1) Choose current events that are age-appropriate and align with your...

It's the year 2023, and teaching social studies is more of a challenge than ever before. If you have been in the classroom the past few years, you know just how rough it has been. Between the students, administrators, parents, and the community, social studies teachers are feeling pressure from all directions. 

There are, however, a few exciting trends, techniques, and resources that can help social studies teachers provide our students with the most engaging and effective lessons possible.

One trend that has worked for many teachers is to go back to paper-pencil interactive notebooks. Students have been overwhelmed with technology the past few years. Many of them are burned out on Google Classroom, digital activities, webquests, Kahoot, etc.

I know many of your admin require digital activities but there are easy ways to balance the digital and "analog".

For example, I will have students read an online article and complete an interactive notebook graphic organizer...

One of the most time and energy-saving strategies I started using in my social studies classroom was to employ unit guide packets for students.

These thorough 9-page packets were a huge help in a few ways:

1. Printing the majority of student work at once each unit instead of each day.
2. Students know exactly what they need to know for the test and have it in one place. 
3. If I'm ever out sick, students can just work on their packets. 

They took a long while to create, but I now have packets for every unit in Civics/Government, World History, and US History. That's 48 total packets and over 400 pages of student worksheets! 

Each one features an introductory reading, standards-based Essential Questions to guide the unit, and then 9 pages dedicated to vocabulary, geography, people, timelines, key concepts, and image analysis.

Here's a closer look at what's included on every page: 

Unit Introduction

This page features a short reading on the unit that...

For years, I ended my unit on Reconstruction by teaching about the controversial election of 1876 leading to the Compromise of 1877. The Democrats' "corrupt bargain" allowed Rutherford B. Hayes to be declared the winner in exchange for Union troops to be pulled out of the South. 

This led directly to the Jim Crow Era of the South. The Jim Crow Era was when racial segregation was legalized, African Americans were disenfranchised, and white supremacists controlled governments across the South.

I realized recently that a case study of how dramatic these changes were for people in the South would be a powerful lesson to conclude the unit with. Following the Jan. 6th insurrection at the Capitol (I have a lesson for this here), I came across an article about the only "successful" coup or insurrection in US History.

I couldn't believe I had never heard of it before, but I dove into learning all I could about what happened at Wilmington, NC in 1898 and created this lesson...

The insurrection of January 6th, 2021 is something that will be taught in US History classrooms as long as American History is a part of high school.

Of course, it can be difficult to maintain the right perspective when teaching events that are so recent. However, ignoring this tragic day does a disservice to our students and to what we do as social studies teachers. 

I don't recall anyone saying not to talk about 9/11 immediately after it occurred or in the years since. No one demanded that teachers ignore the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Violent intruders breached what should be one of the most secure buildings on the planet, attacked police, and made violent threats against lawmakers in their hopes for a coup to overturn the will of the American democracy.

I loved what middle school teacher Dylan Huisken told the AP, “Not addressing the attack is to suggest that the civic ideals we teach exist in a vacuum and don’t have any...

If you're a US History teacher looking for PDF worksheets for your high school or middle school classroom, I have tons to share, including this 30+ page packet of free engaging assignments you can download and start using right away. 

Our worksheets are perfect for helping students with reading comprehension, preparing for the Regents review or state assessment, pairing with a video like the Crash Course US History series, or with your lesson plans throughout the school year. 

While they're sometimes belittled, worksheets are an excellent tool for helping students analyze primary sources or better understand a historical event through a secondary source.  

Each US History unit also include thorough 9-page worksheets packets for every unit in the curriculum. These worksheet packets condense everything you need for the unit into one packet, include answers for you in the teacher guide, and are editable with the Google Doc version! 

...

Are you curious about what's included with a Student of History subscription?

Well, let's take a look!

Here's a sneak peek of what your subscription will look like after you login. First, you'll be brought to your dashboard where you'll see the curriculum that you have. It could be Civics, World, or US History.  

After clicking on your curriculum, you’ll see all the units that are included. You get immediate access to all of them immediately after signing up. So, no matter where in the curriculum your course begins, you can get started right away. 

From there, just click on any unit you want to start with and you’ll see it is broken down by day. Most units are between 7-10 days long. That is based on longer block-scheduled classes. So, if you teach daily 45-minute classes, you might need to break up each day’s lesson over two periods.

The lessons are designed to be easy to understand quickly, so you don’t need to slog through a bunch of pages...

With the move to Hybrid and Distance Learning last year, digital learning activities became more important than ever.

Thankfully, I had been using digital notebooks in my classes for a few years. It started with occasional trips to the computer lab. I designed the digital pages I created to look like traditional notebooks - vertically aligned and in the style of the "cut-and-paste" activities we were already doing.

These worked great and students enjoyed them. With the move to fully-digital, however, a few things started to pop up that inspired me to redesign the notebooks. This redesign turned into a complete overhaul of all my digital notebook sets this summer.

You can preview and download any of them through the links below, but here are the major updates and changes:

1. New Horizontal Format - Laptops and Chromebooks obviously have horizontal screens. While the Zoom feature on Google Slides was helpful on the old style notebooks, I wanted students to easily be able to...

Reviewing with games is always more fun for students than review packets or worksheets. Games get kids excited and build upon their competitive instincts to make reviewing material more engaging and impactful.

Traditional classroom review games like Pictionary, Jeopardy, and Kahoot/Gimkit/Quizizz are great. Kids know how to play, love them, and they're easy to implement. My curricula has these review games already made for each unit. 

However, it's good to change things up every so often to keep kids excited and engaged. That's why every so often, we'll play my favorite review game - Review Clue! 

Clue has always been one of my all-time favorite movies ("Two corpses. Everything's fine."). Sadly no students have seen it, so my wealth of quotes is lost on them. BUT it's super easy to play in any subject! 

It's played similarly to the famous board game (which is apparently known as Cluedo is some parts of the word). 

No matter what your subject or unit is, you...

If you're teaching social studies through the COVID-19 pandemic, you've likely tried to connect this moment in history with events in the past from your curriculum. 

Since I have both World History and US History, I wanted separate lessons that would allow students to see connections to history from what they have lived through.

To do this, I developed these two lessons. The first one is for US History and allows kids to analyze primary sources from the 1918 "Spanish Flu" pandemic. The second one for World History has students analyzing a primary source from the plague.

US History - The Spanish Flu of 1918 and Coronavirus

The 1918 Spanish Flu was one of the deadliest pandemics of all time. It affected nearly 1/3 of the entire world and killed millions. 

It didn't develop in Spain, but earned the name because other nations censored any news of widespread sickness because of World War 1. Spain was neutral in the war and one of the few countries that accurately reported how...