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From the site: "Teaching with Historic Places (TwHP) uses properties listed in the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places to enliven history, social studies, geography, civics, and other subjects. TwHP has created a variety of products and activities that help teachers bring historic places into the classroom." Including lesson plans and tips!

Lesson Plans: The Lesson Plans link has SO MANY lesson plans. They are designed at a middle school level but can easily be adapted (says them). The lesson plans are organized by Location/State; Theme; Time period; and Skill - meaning that you can click on any one of those subdivisions and search them that way. Very exciting! You should definitely check these out. Even if you're not in that state, they still have pictures, mapping materials, and activity ideas that you can use to incorporate geography into historic concepts. For example, the Battle of Bunker Hill lesson contains two maps (of Boston today and in 1775) and inquiry questions for these, a section of text (looks like a high school level to me) and inquiry questions for that AND three images (one a sketch of an encampment and two pictures) and inquiry questions for those. These might make fantastic "Do Now"s for the beginning of the lesson even if you didn't use any of the rest of the sites info. So neat!

Also they have lots of tips for how you can incorporate place into your lessons. AND! you can submit your own lessons. They take you through the TwHP lesson creation process and you can submit them.

The History Place is a privately-run website that provides content to educators on a wide variety of historical subject. I have included this section on the Irish Potato Famine, as it was one of the more compelling narratives I found on the internet.

History Channel interactive "place-the-state" game.

This site is, overall, a little boring but it does what it's supposed to do. Sometimes getting students interested in geography is tricky but this game could increase student interest. Students will select a level, then drag and drop the states to their correct location on the map. There could be a little more information about each state (just to increase the amount of learning) but this is generally a good, basic, online learning game.

These sites help you locate historic places and monuments in your region.

The UN's Millennium Goals as they have constructed them for kids. It's still a ton of information and not in the easiest or most engaging format but it might be a great place for students to get started examining world issues like Hunger, HIV/AIDS or Infant Mortality and what they can do.

This article provides a great hisory of something in our own backyard here in DC - Arlington National Cemetery and its history in the Washington family and as the home of Robert E. Lee. Studying this could be a way to link the Civil War to the area.

Winterthur (in Delaware) is the former country estate of Henry Francis duPont. He was one of the first avid collectors of American fine and decorative arts and the museum (aside from being a beautiful place to visit) is now a leading center for scholarship in the field. The museum has created packets of primary-source materials that can be used in classrooms if a field trip is not possible.

This is a great lesson for a middle school geography class that would get students thinking about peoples' motivations for migrating from one place to another. The lesson plan includes objectives and standards as well as the lesson procedure. There are also ideas for extension activities.

A map of historical sites associated with the U.S. Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s-1960s.

Google Earth is a fantastic way to take students to any country in the world! As long as you have a computer and a projector, students can have amazing images of different countries. They also have features to help you study topography and maps.

The Center for Global Studies is based out of the University of Illinois. Their resources primarily come from the University of Illinois but they also have videos and research submitted from other places. Always check the source! I find most of the information to be useful when thinking about world history and global studies type courses.

How might you or another social studies teacher use it in a class?

The ability to show students images of countries, places, cities, and landscapes.  An awesome way to show students the world without leaving the classroom.

This web site is pretty old, but as of at least 2004 it was still being updated. The creators have been traveling the country since 1997 and at every place they go, they post a unique "postcard" and information about the site. They make "stamps" out of important wildlife, people and others. This could be a fantastic and fun teaching tool for younger grades to provide an interesting way to learn about the country.

The National Park Service provides a register of places that teachers can teach/take their students to in order to incorporate historic sites into their lessons. The website provides featured and current lesson plans and guides educators on how they can use it.

Story Corps is an amazing nonprofit project - the goal is to record people's stories and copies are then placed in the Library of Congress. When I worked at the Phillips Collection, StoryCorps came and recorded stories that related to migration because of the Jacob Lawrence Migration Series Exhibition. The stories were very powerful and you could see they way younger generations really responded to hearing the stories of both their own families and strangers. It made the experiences seem so real and connected them to real people.

Part of Enchantedlearning.com, this site has easily accessible and fairly comprehensive information about different topics. This page specifically is about explorers (clearly) and could be very useful as either a place to direct your students to for their own research OR a personal crash course.