Online Resources - Social Studies

Teaching the Colorado Academic Standards in social studies is supported through a wide array of free instructional resources. This webpage lists just a few of these resources and will be updated regularly.

If you are an educator in Colorado and have suggestions for a great free resource please email Stephanie Hartman.

The resources provided on this website are intended to provide a quick access list for educators to use in a way that supports their instructional planning. Provided resources should be previewed and used with teacher discretion. Because this page contains resources outside of the CDE website, CDE cannot control changes in outside content and listing these resources does not indicate an endorsement by the Colorado Department of Education. 

These are a few resources that do not fit into a specific content area:

• FreeTech4Teachers: Numerous free technology based social studies resources.
• Learning for Justice: The Southern Poverty Law Center
  Learning for Justice provides free teaching materials and a quarterly magazine in an effort to promote tolerance. Topics such as The Civil Rights Movement, Rosa Parks, and Dealing with Bullies, are just a few of the issues available in outstanding curriculum materials.
• Reading Like a Historian, Beyond the Bubble (history assessments), and Civic Reasoning from the Digital Inquiry Group (formerly Stanford History Education Group): DIG offers free inquiry based curricular materials using historical documents; document based formative assessments; civic online reasoning curriculum, and free professional development opportunities.
• Reading Quest  This website provides numerous strategies for teaching reading, writing, and discussion strategies in all content areas.

Additional resources are organized by the following disciplines:

• Colorado
• Constitution Day
• Disciplinary, Information & Media Literacy
• Economics
• Geography
• Civics/Government
• U.S. History
• World History