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Trying to bulk up your curriculum before the school year starts?

While it may technically be summer vacation, teachers all know that summer is the prime time to prepare for the next school year. After all, you've only got a couple months before you'll be back in school! Instead of spending time creating your curriculum from scratch, we'd like to provide some online resources to help you build your lesson plans. There are a ton of helpful supplements created by other educators floating around the internet. The trick to narrowing down resources until you find ones that will truly help you is by determining how relevant the material is to your students and your school's standards.

7 teaching resources that will make back to school lesson planning a breeze:

1. Use These BrainPOP Digital Resources

While BrainPOP is better known for its animated curricular resources, the website has an amazing bounty of free teaching materials. Whether you're teaching engineering, music, or health, you'll find fun and engaging materials to use for your elementary and middle school classrooms. Lesson plans, videos, games — BrainPOP has it all!

 

2. Check Out New York Times' 10 Ways to Teach Literature

The New York Times has created a solid resource for popular titles used by middle schools and high schools across the nation. In this database, you'll also be able to search through more than 150 Times articles related to almost any book using their search systems. Talk about comprehensive!

 

3. Do an Experiential Workshop with LitWits

We met LitWits at an education convention this year and hit it off immediately because of our shared love of books and learning. All of their workshops have been tested with focus groups and all of their supplemental materials are aligned with Common Core State Standards! Their kits are all-in-one instant resources that save you time from patching together lesson plans on your own — and worth every penny.

 

4. Sign up for Success Academy's Education Institute

Success Academy Charter Schools is sharing its education models with teachers, principals, superintendents, and policymakers across the country.  The Success Academy Education Institute is a free, open source platform; Ed Institute gives educators in every state access to curriculum, tools, and training.

 

5. Simplify Tough Subjects with HippoCampus

HippoCampus is a great tool for those teaching middle and high schoolers. While it isn't as fun and bubbly as BrainPOP, HippoCampus is extremely thorough. The free, core academic website uses multimedia content like videos, animations, and simulations to teach a variety of general education subjects.

6. Listen to an Education Podcast

While you're on the road and traveling for your summer vacation, take advantage of your transit time by listening to a podcast designed for educators! Edutopia's Best Education Podcasts and EdSurge's 16 Education Podcasts to Check Out in 2017 are great places to start. Chances are, your favorite education associations have podcasts of their own as well, so do a quick web search to find them.

Pro Tip: Download the podcast episodes at home so you save data when you're on-the-go!

 

7. Subscribe to BookPal's Blog

If you liked this list, subscribe to the blog! We publish educational blog posts, host giveaways that will bulk up your school's media center, and keep you up-to-date with the latest ideas and books in the education space.

 

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This post was written by Elizabeth Lee, the marketing manager at BookPal. She is currently reading Radical Candor by Kim Scott and Strengths Based Leadership by Tom Rath.