Looking for More Inspiration?

A subscriber recently wrote me to ask for suggestions of history-related sites/history education related sites.

Natasha and I have already told you about Chronicling America. Here are some others:

Teachinghistory.org bills itself as "A single destination for K-12 American history content, teaching methods, and current research." It has quick links for elementary, middle, and high school teachers, lesson plan and website reviews, and suggestions for best practices. 

Stanford History Education Group is changing the way history is taught with its "Beyond the Bubble" assessments of historical thinking and its "Reading Like a Historian" American and World history document-based lesson plans, now aligned to the Common Core.

A site I've recently discovered (and only because Ruth Ferris used it as a model for our newest 8-12 lesson plan, "Hazel Hunkins, Billings Suffragist) is History Labs.History Labs offers model lesson plan and a template to build your own lesson plan, one which asks an “overarching question,” builds background knowledge, and has students conduct source work in order to present and support their interpretations. Pretty spiff!

And, of course, there's our own website, Montana Historical Society Educator Resources. We've reorganized the page recently. In addition to multi-faceted resources like the Montana: Stories of the Land textbook, the Hand's-on History Footlockers, or Montana Mosaic: 20th Century People and Events, we've divided our lesson plans into the following categories: 

• Indian Education for All Lesson Plans  The Montana Historical Society has produced a number of lesson plans to help your students grasp the Essential Understandings regarding Montana Indians while learning more about specific Montana history topics.
• Integrating Art and History  Discover lesson plans on Charlie Russell, Montana's Cowboy Artist; Plains Indian pictographic art; and Plateau Indian beaded bags.
• Teaching with Primary Sources  Discover the many lesson plans the Montana Historical Society has created that provide students an opportunity to analyze primary source material, including artwork, photographs, letters, diary entries, historic newspapers, and more.
• Mining History Lesson Plans and Resources  Discover a wide array of resources for studying mining history, including a study guide to accompany the reminiscence, Girl from the Gulches: The Story of Mary Ronan, and a lesson plan to help students explore historic digitized newspapers.
• Teaching with Biographies  Find links to online biographies as well as lesson plans that ask students to investigate remarkable Montanans. 
• Women's History Resources and Lesson Plans Discover an abundance of material on Montana's women's history, including fascinating stories, intriguing photographs, and detailed lesson plans.
• Civics and Geography Looking for a lesson that explains the electoral process, provides an example of how laws affect individuals' lives, or introduces your students to Montana geography while improving their map reading skills? Find them here. 

If there are other categories you think would be useful (for example, Teaching with Images), let me know and I'll see what I can do. And send me a link to your favorite history/teaching site and I'll include it in a future post.