Join the National Museum of American History on March 5, 2013 for "Decoding History" a 30 minute virtual field trip produced in collaboration with Scholastic Publishing and the 39 Clues book series. The field trip is designed for students in grades 3-5 and is free of charge. Register online. Smithsonian's History Explorer website contains hundreds of free standards-based online resources for teaching and learning American history.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Pentagon Memorial Fund, and the Flight 93 National Memorial offer a free online conference, September 11: Teaching Contemporary History, for K-12 teachers. Designed to provide educators with resources and strategies for discussing the September 11 attacks at the 10th anniversary, the conference will include roundtable discussions with content experts and six workshop sessions. These sessions and the conference website highlight resources available at each organization, provide background information on September 11, and encourage conversations on how to document, preserve, and interpret recent history and current events.

Van Valen's Gold Rush Journey -- encourages 6th - 8th graders to learn what life was like during the gold rush by investigating the journal of Alex Van Valen, a man who set sail in 1849 to stake his claim in the California gold fields. The website includes a rich set of primary sources to explore and analyze, an interactive guide where students can record, save and print their findings, as well as a teacher's guide.