Discovery Education has a set of resources covering this topic that will have some things you can use as part of Black History Month including teacher tips and resources.

As you look at interesting information about Sandy, this is an excellent opportunity to talk with students about all of the interactive ways to follow stories. Start with this article from Poynter about the creative ways journalists are covering the story including official stories. You can embed some of these on your own website or have them use the embed code and do it themselves. They could build a hurricane information portal and learn a lot about HTML on a topic that interests all of them. Meanwhile as we watch from afar, our hearts go out to those in this storm - I’ve been there and it is scary.

“The Library of Congress, in collaboration with the U.S. Senate, House of Representatives and the Government Printing Office (GPO), today unveiled Congress.gov, a new public beta site for accessing free, fact-based legislative information. Congress.gov features platform mobility, comprehensive information retrieval and user-friendly presentation. Congress.gov, at beta.congress.gov, eventually will replace the public THOMAS system and the congressional Legislative Information System (LIS).”

Constitution Day is September 17. Discuss the US Constitution and the democracy in the US constitution. Here are some excellent lesson plans including one I like called “design a constitution” that helps you see the “different types of democracy and sovereignty evident in the US political system.” You could also do a play on the word constitution and have a “build your constitution” day with some good old American hamburgers and hot dogs while you study the constitution. ;-)

The Google World Wonders Project is a combination online museum and textbook but is a wonder in itself. Each site on the globe that is a wonder is linked to photos, videos, information,and a map about the site. This is the perfect companion for this flipping the classroom.

This link takes you to the teacher guides and suggested history topics for how you can use the site. This is a must share for history teachers around the world.

Leonardo da Vinci’s birthday is April 15. You can study him as a person with the videos and lesson plans here but also the Renaissance as he’s called the original “Renaissance Man.’ Here are materials for teachers to discuss this time in history, art, science, and so many other things.

The anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic is Sunday. Here are over 400 lesson plans, IWB’s, PowerPoints, and resources to use with classes of all ages. (just filter by age on the left) You can review and teach history, reading lessons, just about anything around this event and it will be interesting as they are seeing it on the news now.