Julia G. Thompson

February 8, 2014

I am always looking for better ways to design and deliver lessons. Here is a quick bit of information from First-Year Teacher's Survival Guide with some of the sites that I have found most useful.

Although there are dozens of online sites devoted to lesson plans, the sites in the list below offer a comprehensive assortment of free lesson plans and lesson plan resources for K-12 educators. These sites are not limited in the topics that they cover, but allow teachers to access lesson plans that cover a wide variety of content areas. At some sites, teachers may need to register to be able to fully use all of the resources at the site, but at the time of publication, all of these sites were free resources for educators.

A to Z Teacher Stuff (http://www.atozteacherstuff.com) A to Z Teacher Stuff is a teacher-created site designed to help teachers find lesson plans, thematic units, teacher tips, discussion forums, printable worksheets as well as many more online resources.

Discovery Education (http://www.discoveryeducation.com) Discovery Education offers an enormous wealth of resources for teachers—digital media, hundreds of easily adaptable lesson plans, worksheets, clip art, and much more.

Explore (http://explore.org) Sponsored by the Annenberg foundation, Explore’s library consists of hundreds of brief, original films and more than30,000 photographs from around the world on a wide range of topics such as animal rights, health, poverty , the environment, education, and spirituality.

Federal Resources for Educational Excellence (http://free.ed.gov) At Free, teachers can access more than 1,500 federally supported teaching and learning resources submitted from dozens of federal agencies. While these are not actual lesson plans in themselves, these resources can be invaluable tools in designing instruction.

ForLessonPlans (http://www.forlessonplans.com) ForLessonPlans is an online directory of free lesson plans for K-12 teachers. Created by teachers, this site offers lesson plans that cover many different subjects as well as links to other resources.

HotChalk (http://lessonplanspage.com) At HotChalk’s lesson plans page, teachers can access over 3,500 lesson plan. The extensive selection of lesson plans at this helpful resource site were first developed by students and faculty at the University of Missouri in 1996 and later expanded to Website users.

The Independent Television Service (http://www.itvs.org) The Independent Television Service (ITVS) presents award-winning documentaries and dramas as well as innovative new media projects on the Web. Teachers can find interactive games and lessons plans that accompany the media presentations.

Lesson Planet (http://www.lessonplanet.com) Founded in 1999, Lesson Planet enables teachers to search more than 400,000 teacher-reviewed lesson plans, worksheets, and other resources in an online, professional community. A free trial is available.

LessonPlans.com (http://www.lessonplans.com) Maintained by the Educators Network, LessonPlans.com offers thousands of teacher-created lessons plans in an easy-to-search format organized by topic as well as by grade level.

National Education Association (http://www.nea.org) The National Education Association Website offers thousands of lesson plans in an easily searchable format. Teachers can also find a variety of lesson planning resources as well as practical tips for classroom use.

Scholastic (http://www.scholastic.com) Scholastic offers thousands of free lesson plans, unit plans, discussion guides, and extension activities for all grade levels and content areas.

Share My Lesson (http://www.sharemylesson.com) Share My Lesson is maintained by the American Federation of Teachers and TES Connect. Developed by teachers for teachers, this free platform provides over 250,000 teaching resources and provides an online collaborative community. Share My Lesson also has a significant resource bank for Common Core State Standards.

Teachers Network (http://teachersnetwork.org) Teachers Network, a New York City nonprofit organization for educators, offers thousands of lesson plans and lesson plan resources covering a wide assortment of topics in a variety of formats for teachers at all grade levels.

Teaching Channel (https://www.teachingchannel.org) Funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, Teaching Channel is a video showcase of innovative and effective teaching practices schools. Instead of traditional lesson plans, teachers can watch brief videos of effective teaching ideas that they may want to implement in their own classrooms.

Thinkfinity (http://www.thinkfinity.org) Thinkfinity is the Verizon Foundation’s online professional learning community, providing free access to over 50,000 educators, thousands of digital resources aligned to state standards and the common core, as well as blogs and discussion groups."