Lesson Plans

• Each kit comes with easy-to-use and comprehensive lesson plans:
• Save teachers time with fact-checked, historically accurate content aligned to the 2025 West Virginia College and College Readiness standards.
• Plans feature ideas to extend to citizenship, encourage active public service among students, and develop civic and democratic values as students become well-rounded citizens.
• Embedded differentiation tips to support English language learners and their language acquisition are included.
• Lessons seamlessly integrate social studies instruction into the ELA block with everything needed to support instruction and the flexibility of multiple instructional strategies.

Management Guide

Facilitate implementation with a standards alignment, a scope and sequence, and pacing plans to make teacher use streamlined and user-friendly.

Content-Area Texts

• Cultivate students’ curiosity about historical regional events with dynamic primary source readers and leveled reader’s theater scripts.
• Build literacy skills and content-area knowledge.
• Embedded primary sources, high-interest content, and visually appealing layouts to cultivate student's curiosity about history.
• Examine history through multiple perspectives and boost literacy skills while focusing on history, geography, economics, and civics topics.
• Integrate with small-group instruction during social studies or within a Balanced Literacy approach. Feature Reader's Theater scripts with differentiated roles so teachers can assign roles based on student's reading levels, which allows all students to participate in the same activity for an inclusive classroom.

Primary Sources

Primary sources breathe life into history and capture students' curiosity about past events.

• Provide students with a deeper and more comprehensive view of local historical events through maps, letters, photographs, political cartoons, and more! Strengthen inquiry-based learning and critical thinking through the analysis of primary sources to make real-life connections to the past.
• Help students build their understanding of historical events by evaluating multiple perspectives to foster awareness, tolerance, and compassion, and employ decision-making skills.
• Support and encourage authentic discourse in the classroom to challenge students to be attentive listeners and courteous responders.

Student Inquiry

The Student Inquiry Handbook (full color; standards-aligned) provides opportunities for meaningful application of literacy skills and social studies concepts through engaging activities.

Student Engagement

• Develops critical-thinking and problem-solving skills. Encourages inquiry-based learning through discussion questions, document-based assessments, and primary source analysis activities to make history come alive./li>
• Extension activities and ideas to develop citizenship and inspire students to be civic-minded beyond the classroom.
• Develop social studies content knowledge and build literacy skills with resources that cultivate curiosity about civics, geography, history, and economics, helping students understand the world around them and their connection to it.