If you want to give a successful lesson, you’ll need to plan it out carefully. Writing a lesson plan can take hours and requires experience and great attention to detail. If you’re pressed for time, you’ll have a bad time coming up with your own plan.
This is especially true for social studies. Your job as a teacher is to make children interested in the topics that don’t seem relevant to them, and you need to know exactly what activities keep your student group engaged and focused.
A high-quality lesson plan can help you achieve that goal, and you don’t have to go over the tiresome process of coming up with every single detail by yourself. You can find hundreds of amazing social studies lesson plans created by experienced teachers, so why waste your time and energy on something that’s already there, waiting for you to use it?
We’ll show you exactly where you can find social studies lesson plans you can rely on in an instant.
Social Studies Lesson Plan Examples
Social studies cover a wide range of topics and subjects. Your approach should be different for each subject and the grade you’re teaching—you won’t explain the concept of thunderstorms the same way to kindergarteners as you would to high school students.
Your lesson plan should contain several engaging class activities to ensure your students are paying attention and feeling motivated to learn. Check out some of our first-rate lesson plans for various social studies subjects below.
Lesson Plans for Social Studies—Geography
You know that traveling the world broadens the mind, but your students would hardly agree with that statement at their age. It’s your job to get them interested in learning about and exploring different countries, continents, and places on Earth—first in theory, then in practice.
You can help your students discover all the unique places in the four corners of our planet by using these lesson plans for your geography classes:
- Australia: Location
- Pennsylvania: A Micro-Learning Deck | Digital Geography Lesson
- Alabama: A Micro-Learning Deck | Digital Geography Lesson
- Mapping Skills with Google Earth: Map Your Country
- Passport Series: Asia
Lesson Plans for Social Studies—Law and Government
Understanding how the law works is one of the most important aspects of preparing your students for adulthood, and you have to make sure they take in some of the most common law, judicial, and governmental concepts.
Check out the following lesson plans that can help you get your students excited about law and government studies:
- Everyday Law for Young Citizens: A Working Guide
- Judicial Branch of the Government: History Speaks
- President’s Day | Reading Comprehension Deck | Interactive Lesson
- Aspects of Government in Canada Gr. 5
- Origins of the American Government | Reading Comprehension Deck | Interactive Lesson
- World Political Leaders Gr. 5-8
Lesson Plans for Social Studies—History
Every history teacher knows that it takes a lot of skill and preparation to make history relatable to students and make them interested in something that happened centuries ago. They may not care about what year the Declaration of Independence was written, but they will probably love to play a game of reenactment and learn about the historical event that way. This is where a solid lesson plan comes in.
Check out the table below to find some of our best history lesson plans and see how they present key history facts to different student levels:
Why Choose Online Social Studies Lesson Plans
Every student group is different, and nobody knows your students as well as you do. You’re the ideal person to write a lesson plan for your students as you know exactly what activities they respond to and how you can make them interested in learning.
Writing a lesson plan, though, is not as easy as it seems. You need to choose a proper lesson plan template, write a lesson plan objective that’s specific and measurable, and fill out every other part of a lesson plan without making the lesson too long or short. It can take hours to write a lesson plan, and you’re likely to leave an important activity out if you’re not experienced in writing lesson plans.
If you look up lesson plans for social studies, you’ll find thousands of lesson plans that fit the criteria and vary based on the grade and subject. Why spend hours on creating a lesson plan from scratch when you can find a perfectly good one online, adapt it slightly to fit your student group, and be ready for the class in minutes?
The only issue is that browsing through thousands of resources is not an easy feat—if you don’t know where to look, you can spend more time searching for a well-written lesson plan than writing one by yourself.
How To Choose a Social Studies Lesson Plan Online
You can find two types of lesson plans for social studies:
- Free social studies lesson plans
- Paid social studies lesson plans
As with everything else, you get what you pay for. Free lesson plans are mediocre at best and will take a lot of adapting and rewriting to become usable. In most cases, they:
- Don’t have established timelines and diverse learning activities
- Don’t have a precise list of assessment methods and materials
- Lack an objective that’s clear and attainable
- Don’t follow social studies lesson plans standards and curriculums
- Can’t be easily coordinated with your other weekly or monthly plans
If you don’t want to pay for a lesson plan, you can use a free plan as a guideline when writing a lesson plan on your own, but don’t expect to get something you can use instantly.
Paid lesson plans offer you what you want and need—but only if you find the right one. The trouble is that websites offering teaching materials allow only a small preview of the plan before you pay to download it. This means that you can’t tell if a plan fits your teaching style and curriculum until you pay up and check out the whole thing.
You can end up spending hundreds of dollars until you stumble upon a plan that will check all the boxes. The only way to avoid these expenses is to find a trustworthy source that doesn’t ask for payment every time you log in.
Teach Simple—Get the Best Materials for Less Money
Teach Simple is a subscription-based source for all lesson plans and other teaching materials you’ll ever need. All of our materials are created by teachers who know what it’s like to face a bunch of uninterested kids and get them excited about a social topic.
Before we publish a lesson plan, other teachers review it to ensure it meets all the standards so that you can rest assured you’re downloading a high-quality plan you can take into your class care-free.
When it comes to social studies lesson plans, we offer materials for all grades:
When you register for Teach Simple, you can make unlimited downloads without any extra expenses. All you need to do is create an account, and you can download any product that catches your eye.
How Teach Simple Can Help You Get All You Need
With Teach Simple, you’ll get access to high-quality materials that will cover all your needs. You can use our marketplace to find:
Aside from social studies, we offer lesson plans for various other subjects, including math, art, and nutrition, as well as special lesson plans for ESL students and materials for those in need of speech therapy.
You can use our search interface to combine various filters and find specific types of materials based on grade, subject, and both of them combined. With the navigation system, you can narrow down the results to a single product and not waste time going over each product page and reading the details to see if it fits your needs.
The beauty of Teach Simple is that we’re dedicated to turning teaching into a better, more rewarding profession. Aside from helping you out with teaching materials, we give 50% of our monthly revenue to our contributors, and by signing up, you’ll support your fellow colleagues.
You can sign up for Teach Simple for free with our 30-day trial and make unlimited downloads without any future obligations. Once you join Teach Simple, you’ll see how easy it can be to turn your kids into knowledge-craving students.
