Teach American History? Check Out This Map of ALL the Historic Places in North America!

With Common Core based lessons, teachers will have many more opportunities to weave in technology to build the necessary background information needed by ELLs, as well as other students who struggle academically, to access the key content of any lesson.

If U.S. history is the focus, this site will easily supplement and enhance any lesson on U.S. history.  It offers meaning to all the historical monuments which are referred to throughout any history class.  Even more importantly, for ELLs who come to class with little to no background on American history, it not only clearly displays where key events occurred in history, but also photos and brief descriptions behind them.  Canada is also covered here as well.

Though not all sites have images, they may be accessed by satellite so that students can see them.  Thanks to GOOGLE maps, every site can be viewed via street view.  This site could easily be used in a cooperative learning activity where student teams would be assigned to specific sections of the map (all in the same time period) to research key sites of historical interest.  This map could be a start off point to promote discussion among the groups so that they would be better prepared to analyze the historical importance of the site along with event to which it is tied.

HISTORIC PLACES IN NORTH AMERICA---Here is the website.  Teachers will probably wish to model how to effectively navigate it before handing it over to students.  Once that is done, the class (with teacher guidance) could try assigned different sites in teams (practice in navigating site and then finding historical facts on it) and then share findings with the rest of the class.  Once this is completed and everyone has a good idea of how to conduct research on the site, teachers could then plan on group projects where this site would lay the background information.


CATEGORIES OF HISTORICAL SITES---Here is the breakdown of all the time periods.

Hope your students enjoy it:)

Denise

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