The Problem: Wikipedia contains a vast supply of information and is the 5th most trafficked website in the world. Still, many teachers advise students against using it. If students learn to use Wikipedia wisely, it can be a powerful resource for lateral reading, verifying claims, and a starting point for research.

This lesson introduces students to Wikipedia’s standard of verifiability, which requires article authors to provide reliable citations to support claims they make. By following these citations, students can verify the claims in Wikipedia and locate a variety of reliable resources. Students practice verifying claims on Wikipedia by following its citations.

Note: Civic Online Reasoning is motivated by three driving questions: Who's behind the information, What's the evidence and What do other sources say? This lesson is an introduction to one of the main concepts. Registration is required and free.

How do we remember the Civil War? Whose stories are told in the art and memorials from and about the time period? In this resource students will examine works of art from and relating to the Civil War era. Students will also learn about the 54th Regiment of Massachusetts, an all-Black regiment, and compose a written response to a cause they are passionate about.

Sensitive: This resource contains material that may be sensitive for some students. Teachers should exercise discretion in evaluating whether this resource is suitable for their class.

The Claim Evidence Graphic Organizer Writing Template was created for the CESA #1 EL OER Project. This writing template was created for EL students to use to aid in the writing process. It contains a detailed and easy to follow outline for students to input their knowledge. The organizer is color coded so that students will be able to navigate and organize their thoughts and textual evidence. There are also videos that are linked that ELs can watch to help them create each part in their argumentative essay. Teachers are able to apply this template to various argumentative essay assignments within different content areas.

The Climate Literacy and Energy Awareness Network (CLEAN) website includes a collection of educational resources related to climate and energy science. The site also hosts an online community for educators to share and discuss resources and teaching methodology.

In this segment from Colonial House, Colonists and the Passamaquoddy people encounter each other for the first time.

This video from Wide Angle tells the story of two identical twins, one of whom was classified as white and the other as black, highlighting the difficulty in defining race in Brazilian society.

Use the lovable character Curious George to capture your students’ attention while teaching about personal finance and economics. Each lesson features a specific Curious George children’s book and includes fun activities to help your students learn about economics. Economic concepts will include goods and services, natural, capital, and human resources, production, specialization, interdepenence, and saving.

Includes 5 lessons.

This site introduces students to archeology -- the study of material remains to learn about past human experiences. This lesson (Grades 3-8) discusses various challenges of an archaeologist: locating a site that will yield clues about the people who once lived there, conducting excavations, and more. Students identify artifacts from a contemporary setting, describe the function of each artifact, identify methods for dating soil layers, and interpret soil profiles.

This Wide Angle video segment compares two families in Turkey one more religious, and one more secular.

The Supreme Court's opinion in Brown II reflects the struggle between federal and state governments on how and when school desegregation would occur.

This collection of excerpts from legislation and court decisions documents key phases of the legal struggle to gain and implement equal education.

In this lesson, students will be introduced to one of the main ways that the Great Lakes impact the economy of the region—shipping.
Countless ships carry myriad cargo throughout the Great Lakes waterways to various destinations, making the transportation of goods accessible, reliable, and effective. Without the Great Lakes to transport various goods, which are typically shipped in the waterways, many commonly accessible materials would not be available in the ways they are today.
This lesson will afford students the chance to see some of that technology in action, as well as see the direct impact that shipping has on the regional commercial industry.

Bread has been an important part of the human diet since early times. Loaves baked over 5,000 years ago have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs. Wheat has been discovered in pits where human settlements existed 8,000 years ago. In the Stone Age, solid cakes were made from crushed wheat. Bread provided ancient civilizations with a reliable food source.
Students identify the parts of a wheat plant and wheat kernel and investigate the process of milling wheat kernels into flour.

In this lesson, students will learn about what type of information we can learn from photographs. They will
draw conclusions about the past through exploration of photos and explain how people can learn more about their family history through the use of historical records.

This video from Wide Angle reports on the increasingly difficult conditions for farmers in China that have caused many rural Chinese to flee the countryside.

Irish women discuss social and economic changes that have taken place over the last half century in this video from Wide Angle.

Describe some of the feelings immigrants faced when deciding on a new settlement in the United States.
Contrast the benefits and drawbacks of living in a new location when determining a place to live and compare that to the choices immigrants make past and present.
Formulate several reasons why immigrants elected to live in selected areas.

Students observe physical characteristics of flowers and explore principles of pollination. Pollination is important in producing our food. Pollinators, like bees, are one example of a natural resource used in agriculture.

Kibera, a poor community, in Nairobi, was a blank spot on the map until recently. This video from Penn State Public Broadcasting’s Geospatial Revolution shows how geospatial technology enabled residents to map resources to help their community.

This video segment, adapted from NOVA, chronicles the education of leading chemist Percy Julian. Although Julian began his elementary school years in the Deep South under Jim Crow laws, he became one of the few African Americans of his time to earn a Ph.D.