Lesson Plans & Teaching with Government Information

Provides National Standards for Arts Education and a searchable database of lesson plans.

Learning about sustainable agriculture issues can start at any age. Review instructional books, teaching aids, course outlines, support organizations and other teaching resources for all levels - kindergarten, high school and beyond.

Classroom Materials created by teachers for teachers, these ready-to-use materials provide easy ways to incorporate the Library’s unparalleled primary sources into instruction.

Welcome to Classroom Resources--a diverse collection of lessons and web resources for classroom teachers, their students, and students' families. Materials are arranged by subject area to help you quickly find resources in your interest area, and then use them to create lesson plans or at-home activities. Research areas include: Arctic & Antarctic, Astronomy & Astrophysics, Biology, Chemistry & Materials, Computing, Earth & Environment, Education, Engineering, Mathematics, Nanoscience, People & Society, and Physics.

This online resource for K-12 teachers provides lesson plans that use real scientific data. Topics covered include: El Niño, Sea Level Rise, Coral Bleaching, Water Quality, and Ocean Acidification.

This site provides a variety of activities using documents from the National Archives. These activities were created by educators. Docs Teach also provides thousands of primary sources for use in classroom activities.

Econlowdown incorporates Common Core Standards award-winning, FREE classroom resources for K-16 educators to use to teach about money and banking, economics, personal finance and the Federal Reserve.

EDSITEment! offers a variety of lesson plans, teacher's guides, and media resources for the humanities.

The Kennedy Center site contains arts-centered, standards-based resources for educators. There are also resources from their collection arranged by subject.

Find lesson plans, science projects, and other activities that can be done in the classroom or at home to get K-12 students excited about clean energy!

The site provides resources for working with primary sources, teaching with records of Congress, distance learning opportunities, and professional development opportunities for educators.

The Smithsonian's Museum of Asian Art, the Freer and Sackler Galleries, has images and descriptions from previous and current exhibitions. The site includes curriculum guides, lesson plans, classroom posters, & more.

Classroom resources (lesson plans, publications, activities) by grade (K-4, 5-8, 9-12) and topic (Federal Reserve, Personal Finance, Banking, Financial Fundamentals, Economics, Money, Monetary Policy); Multimedia (videos, podcasts, games & simulation, quizzes). Click on “Resources by Audience” to filter activities by grade level.

Browse the lesson plans to find a world of curricular experiences from Smithsonian Folkways’ Network of Music Educators. All lessons can be downloaded in PDF format.

Provides educational resources and lesson plans for educators. Educators can browse and search for topics as well as narrow their search by grade level.

The United States Mint H.I.P. Pocket Change™ Web site shows how connected people are to coins. The games, stories, and other activities bring coins to life. They present not only the extraordinary people pictured on the coins, but also the generations of citizens who have carried this change. The United States Mint offers free, complete lesson plans for grades K-12. Use coins as a jumping-off point to teach science, social studies, math, and more.

Developed by classroom educators with the goal of promoting critical thinking and problem solving skills among students, each lesson plan explores a topic covered in the exhibition and is supplemented with materials appropriate for K-12 classes, in addition to information about suggested grade levels, required time, learning outcomes, background information, vocabulary, materials, evaluation, extension, and relevant standards.

From the National Agricultural Library, this site provides general educational resources for students K-12 for invasive aquatic, animal, microbe, and plant species.

Find an array of environmental and science based lesson plans, activities and ideas from the EPA, other federal agencies and external organizations. ​

This resource provides lesson plans on a variety topics including: African American History, American History, American Indian History, the Civil War, World War I, and more.

Find an array of environmental and science based lesson plans, activities and ideas below from EPA, other federal agencies and external organizations. ​

Find an array of environmental and science based lesson plans, activities and ideas from the EPA, other federal agencies and external organizations. Topics include: Air, Climate Change, Ecosystems, Energy, Health, Waste, and Water. Grade levels are indicated. Site also provides predefined search terms for free PDF publications: Activity Book, Coloring Books, Earth Day, Environmental Education, Posters, Science Fair, Students, and Teachers.

The FDIC’s new Money Smart for Young People series features four free age-appropriate curriculums that are designed to promote financial understanding in young people. Money Smart for Young People curriculums are available for: Grades Pre-K-2, Grades 3-5, Grades 6-8, and Grades 9-12.

Whether you communicate with the public or professionals, or teach students or other educators, MyPlate offers a framework for communicating food and nutrition messages based on the Dietary Guidelines for Americans 2020-2025.

Activities, games and activities that help your students learn about space and Earth science.

Divided by K-4, 5-8, and 9-12. Search hundreds of resources. Lesson plans and teaching materials to support STEM curriculum.
Toolkits are compilations of free downloadable resources with various science themes. For example, toolkits may contain ready-to-print posters, social media graphics, or bookmark templates. Topics include Mars, total solar eclipses, and science calendars. Explore and download resources today!

The National Center for Agricultural Literacy (NCAL) is a collaborative effort supported by the USDA - National Institute of Food and Agriculture, the National Agriculture in the Classroom Organization, and Utah State University. The overarching goal of the National Center for Agricultural Literacy is to change how the world thinks about agricultural systems related to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM), their quality of life, and our environment.

National Hispanic Heritage Month is observed every year from September 15 to October 15. From this site teachers can access lesson plans for National Hispanic Heritage Month from the Library of Congress, the National Archives, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Gallery of Art, the National Park Services, and the Smithsonian Institution.

National History Day is a non-profit organization that operates an annual project-based contest for students in grades 6-12. It has affiliates in all fifty states, Washington, D.C., Puerto Rico, Guam, American Samoa, South Korea, China, South Asia, and Central America.

The Portrait Gallery has a variety of resources for the classroom that have been developed to complement their exhibitions. Users can view and print their online materials or download them as PDF files. Visit their online collections to search, browse, and augment your lesson plans.

"A diverse collection of lessons and web resources for classroom teachers, their students and students' families. Materials are arranged by subject area to help you quickly find resources in your interest area, and then use them to create lesson plans or at-home activities" -- NSF Classroom Resources web page.

Library of Congress (LOC) - links to primary sources and teacher's guide. Includes a brief timeline.

Lesson plans for teachers, learning about the metric measuring system, and fun superhero cards for students,

Education resources are distributed across many websites and program offices at NOAA and on NOAA partner websites. This portal is designed to assist educators in accessing these materials from one centralized interface. The content here is a sampling of NOAA's education resources and more can be found at each linked location.

Access multimedia presentations, educational materials, and lesson plans that enhance environmental literacy and knowledge of ocean discovery and exploration.

Comprehensive lesson plans present NOAA science through activities using online data from NOAA, and other trusted Web sites. The lessons are correlated to National Science Education Standards and the Ocean Literacy Essential Principles and Fundamental Concepts. The Lessons are designed to supplement existing curricula at the middle and high school levels.

Building on its long tradition of working with the academic community, the Office of the Historian has expanded its outreach efforts by producing quality teaching materials on diplomacy for American middle and high school students. These include: Documents on Diplomacy: Primary Source Documents and Lessons from the World of Foreign Affairs, 1775-2011 (2011); When the Border Vanishes: Diplomacy and the Threat to our Environment and Health (2010); A Journey Shared: The United States and China, 200 Years of History (2008); Today in Washington: the Media and Diplomacy (2006); Sports and Diplomacy in the Global Arena (2005); A History of Diplomacy (2004); Terrorism: A War without Borders (2002).

Peace Corps’ innovative Coverdell World Wise Schools program brings the Peace Corps experience home to American classrooms. The newly redesigned World Wise Schools site makes it easier than ever for you to find your favorite free cross-cultural learning materials including videos, lesson plans, podcasts, publications, and much more. Browse or search our many lesson plans to translate firsthand experiences of Peace Corps Volunteers into cultural, geographical, and language arts lessons for your students.

Presentations and Activities look across the American Memory collections to investigate curricular themes. They include historical background, helping to tell the story behind the theme.

Find primary source sets on dozens of historical topics. From Abraham Lincoln to World War I, the Library of Congress provides a rich set of resources for teachers. Included are the “Student Discovery Sets”.

Soil education for grades K-6, 7-12, and college. Includes soil facts and lesson plans.

Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, commonly known as STEM, are the essential building blocks to accomplishing the U.S. Department of Energy's mission from coast to coast. STEM Rising is their initiative to inspire, educate, and spark an upwards trajectory to lifelong success in STEM through sharing the Department's National Labs, National Nuclear Security Administration, and program office's programs, resources, competitions, events, internship opportunities and more. View their STEM resources for students, teachers, and the energy workforce on this site and sign up for our monthly newsletter to keep in touch.

The free K-12 STEM materials on the NIGMS site are provided by the institutes and centers within the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and NIH grantees. Information and lessons on the science behind various health topics are included. Lessons combine cutting-edge biomedical discoveries with state-of-the-art instructional practices.

Designed for K-12 educators, this site provides lesson plans on the topics of: Air, Climate Change, Ecosystems, Energy, Health, Reduce/Reuse/Recycle, and Water.

Search lesson plans by subject, grade level, and keyword.

This webpage offers classroom materials and professional development materials to help teachers effectively use primary sources from the Library's vast digital collections in their teaching. Website includes links to Library of Congress resources for teachers, including the Memory Collection, Today in History, etc. Also included are resources useful for parents and children and librarians, such as the Student Discovery Sets (free ebooks) which are in the Classroom Materials section, under the Primary Source Sets.

This site includes lessons, activities & ideas to integrate art into the classroom. Users can also explore & borrow free resources with background information on artists & art movements. Images and image sets are also available for download and use in the classroom.

National parks are America's largest classrooms. Find lesson plans about these great places. The website is user friendly and easily searchable by location, keyword, and more than 125 subjects, ranging from archeology to biology to Constitutional law. The site also features materials produced by National Park Service programs, including lesson plans from the National Register of Historic Places' award-winning Teaching with Historic Places program. At launch, the website offered more than 700 lesson plans, 140 field trips, 50 traveling trunks, 44 distance learning opportunities, 16 teachers' institutes, 47 online galleries, and 100 teacher workshops, and will add new content as it is developed. Select subjects (Language Arts, Math, Science, Social Studies); select grade level (Lower Elementary, Upper Elementary, Middle School, High School); or select Common Core.

The Atmospheric Radiation Measurement (ARM) Climate Research Facility Education and Outreach Program creates basic science lessons related to weather and climate for K-12th grade. ARM Education strives to make lessons that are relevant to the needs of the schools in the communities where the ARM Program has their sites, the Southern Great Plains (SGP) of the United States, the Tropical Western Pacific (TWP), and the North Slope of Alaska (NSA). However, almost all of these lessons are useful for students anywhere.

The Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino has created a variety of bilingual materials to enhance the classroom learning experience.

NOAA Climate.gov has a variety of resources for teachers including information on teaching climate literacy as well as a variety of lesson plans.

The National Archives provides primary source-based lesson plans that correlate to the National History Standards and National Standards for Civics and Government.

More than half the National Park Service's 384 units were added to the system primarily because of their historical or cultural significance. The six lessons in Explore Your National Parks: Historic Places illustrate how parks document many of the most important developments in American history. Lessons: San Antonio Missions: Spanish Influence in Texas; The Old Courhouse in St. Louis: Yesterday and Today; Choices and Commitments: The Soldiers at Gettysburg; The Invention Factory: Thomas Edison’s Laboratories; Remembering Pearl Harbor: The USS Arizona Memorial; First Lady of the World: Eleanor Roosevelt at Val-Kill.

Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) Inquiry Kits were funded by a grant from the Library of Congress and developed by Maryland Humanities and Maryland Public Television. The TPS Inquiry Kits support K-12 educators and students and include five primary sources, mostly from the Library of Congress, and one secondary source. Primary sources include images, maps, audio, or video to support accessibility by students of any reading level.

Understanding Taxes offers 38 lesson plans. Detailed lesson plans guide teachers’ instruction from the introduction of a given tax concept, through its development, to the lesson conclusion. Each lesson plan serves as an instructional guide on how to incorporate tax theory, history, and application into your classroom. This also gives teachers the freedom to choose lesson content and activities to use in the classroom.

Discover a wealth of curricular ideas, scientific data, maps, and other resources to support biology, geography, geology, geospatial data, and hydrology! Selected USGS educational resources useful to educators in primary (K-6) and secondary (7-12) school grades. Many of these resources can be used directly in the classroom (see Resource Symbols) or will be useful in classroom lessons or demonstration activities preparation, or as resources for teacher education and curriculum development.