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...

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...

Stations lessons are some of my favorite activities in my social studies classes. They're a great way to get kids up and moving around the room and that's more engaged in whatever topic recovering. Instead of just sitting at their seats at traditional way and taking in material, they're able to move around the room and learn.

They also work with any subject area and any unit you might be covering in history. They can be higher level, with students analyzing more advanced texts and sources at each station, or feature simple political cartoons, maps, or short excerpts at each station for lower level classrooms.

There’s no set template that you need to use for all stations lessons, but here are 5 ways to make your stations lesson plans rock!

1) To Time or Not to Time the Stations?

Stations can definitely vary in the structure. You might want to set a timer for a specific amount of time that students spend at each station. Or, it might work best if students are free to spend...

One of the most important things kids need to learn now in social studies is about Fake News”. Obviously, you hear about Fake News all the time. It dominates social media and the news outlets.

Kids need to be able to recognize what is fake news, what is real news, and how can you tell the difference. This is a 21st century skill that every kid needs to learn in high school. It's so important for our society to teach these kinds of skills so that kids can graduate with the ability to be informed citizens.

I teach this lesson about fake news in both my US history and my American government classes.

I love this lesson because it connects students to fake news in history from the Yellow Journalism era of the late 1800’s early 1900s’ in American history and also the fake news of today.

The Lesson Plan

I start the lesson off with a warm-up cartoon from the yellow journalism era and ask students to interpret it. Then we look at for glaring examples of fake news from...

One of the most important lessons we can teach high school students now is how to critically view media and news in order to understand what is true, what is biased, and what is outright "fake news".

My new lesson plan on Media and Fake News is a perfect one to use for this in any of your social studies classes. Included in the lesson plan download is a complete teacher instructions page for the lesson, an engaging warm up activity, presentation, group activity, videos homework, and more! 

For a warm up, students are given 4 blatant fake news articles. In groups they analyze these and look for clues as to why they might be real or fake and how they can tell. 

Following a discussion on why articles like this exist and how to recognize them, you transition to a PowerPoint on the role of the media. This visually engaging presentation covers the function of the media in society, bias, and how to recognize fake news. Both a printable guided...