Education Designs helps teachers improve the quality of classroom instruction through the use of Primary Sources and other documents in the classroom.

• Primary sources are the raw materials of history — original documents and objects created at the time under study.
• Examining primary sources gives students a powerful sense of history and the complexity of the past.
• Analyzing primary sources can also guide students toward higher-order thinking and better critical thinking and analysis skills.

We understand the need to differentiate instruction to accommodate student learning styles and educational requirements. We invite teachers to use these resources to help you develop more effective lesson plans.

Resources on this page will help teachers navigate the incredible wealth of information on primary sources and contains sites that provide primary source material and sites to help teachers make better use them, such as analysis documents.

We invite you to use and explore these sites which provide useful resources to help teachers offer exciting and varied approaches to the classroom.

This page contains links to the National Standards for History as well as important lists to help teachers organize their history instruction, such as Vital Themes and Narratives, Habits of the Mind and Themes of Social Studies.

This page contains sample materials and lesson plans developed for use in Education Designs Workshops.

This page contains a wealth of lesson plans developed by teachers in various workshops.  Lesson plans are cataloged by Standards in History by grade level and era.

The standards were developed by the National Center for History in the Schools at the University of California, Los Angeles under the guidance of the National Council for History Standards with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the U.S. Department of Education.