Looking for some great resources to teach history? iLEAD parent Amy Stevens has been developing a list of excellent tools for teaching social studies.

1. Student’s Friend

This free, online resource provides amazing content that is very accessible and brief. It will make a good spine for looking at history through a lens of sweeping themes.

2. History: The Definitive Visual Guide

This is a great reference book that will help fill in some of the details surrounding the content on Student’s Friend, providing background information for the literature.

3. Big History Project

This is a comprehensive, free online curriculum that focuses on viewing history as a series of “thresholds” of increasing complexity. There is a lot of background on how history is studied, how to test claims and how to make connections between various cultures and civilizations to find patterns in human behavior over time. Lots of critical thinking is involved with this curriculum! There is a public site anyone can join for free, but the best content and lesson plans/activities are found by registering as an educator and setting up a “classroom.”

This is an important video to watch that explains how the simple act of putting information from a round object (our Earth’s geography) onto a flat surface (a map, screen, etc.) creates huge distortions in our thinking.

This online atlas of world history shows changes in people groups, civilizations and empires and over time. It helps give a visual sense of where seemingly disparate “historical events” took place both in location and time. There’s also a nice timeline below which shows the overlapping civilizations/empires over time.

This website shows migrations and how populations changed over time. There’s no commentary, just data visualization with links to relevant Wikipedia pages. Info about the project can be found here .

Utilizing literature written by members of the culture being studied (“Gilgamesh,” “Beowulf,” “The Travels of Marco Polo,” Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc.) is also an excellent way to enrich historical studies. Additionally, well-vetted anthologies of indigenous mythology (“1001 Arabian Nights,” “Robin Hood,” etc.), as well as historical fiction (“The Bronze Bow,” “The Trumpeter of Krakow,” etc.) are also excellent ways to learn more about historical events.

Utilizing primary sources such as “Hammurabi’s Code” when studying the early Babylonians (versus a summary provided by a historian) is also a terrific idea. There are lots of free, online resources for this. Books such as “Eyewitness to History,”
The World’s Great Speeches,” and “World History in Documents” are wonderful resources.