Grades 4 - 5 Social Studies

For Virginia Teachers --

Virginia Standards of Learning: Instruction, Training,and Assessment Resources

Links to Other Sites

50states.com: A multitude of facts and figures about the states, commonwealths, and territories that make up the United States can be found at this site.
American Civil War Collection at the Electronic Text Center (US1.9): Primary source material, including letters, diaries, and newspapers of the Civil War era, has been placed online by the University of Virginia.
Ben's Guide to U.S. Government for Kids: This U.S. government site is divided into grade level sections. The material can be reproduced for educational purposes.
BLS Career Information: The Bureau of Labor Statistics provides this site for students to match occupations to subjects they like in school.
Career Zone: In addition to providing detailed information about many occupations, the visitor to this site can match jobs to his/her interests. A flash and a non-flash version are available.
Chicago Fire: Experience the Chicago fire of 1871 with 12-year-old Claire Innes (a National Geographic site).
Civil War@Smithsonian: Annotated pictures of items in the Smithsonian collection make this a valuable site to those interested in the American Civil War.
A Colonial Family and Community: Learn about the daily lives of a colonial family from Connecticut.
Congress for Kids: This site from the Dirksen Center explains how the federal government works as well as the history of its founding. Each section has a quiz as well as links to related activities outside the site.
Eyewitness to History: This website presents history through the perspective of those who actually lived it. It covers the ancient world through the 20th century.
Historical Voices: Photographs, sound recordings and video make studying the history of the 20th Century a very different experience. This website provides a database that makes much of this recorded history available to students and teachers. This site will work best if you have a broadband connection. You will need the appropriate plug-ins to hear/see the recordings.
The Jamestown Online Adventure: What decisions would you make if you were the captain of the Jamestown expedition? Find out how well you would do at this FLASH site.
The Moonlit Road: Read or listen to ghost stories and folktales of the American South.
National Geographic Map Machine: See different kinds of information in map form: transportation, history, population, climate, battles and more.
OnlineNewspapers.com: Looking for good current events information. This site provides a search engine for the newspapers around the world that have online editions. Some of the links seem to be outdated, but the site is still worth a look.
Paul Revere Virtual Museum: This site is part of the S.C.O.R.E. project. A teacher's guide is available.
States Web Games: Learn the locations, capitals, abbreviations and over 500 important facts about our 50 states. There are interactive quizzes of different skill levels to test your knowledge.
Tenement Museum: Find out what it was like to live in a tenement on New York's Lower East.
United Nations Cyberschoolbus: Information about the UN and its member nations is available in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Chinese, and Arabic. Some games are available.
USA Geography: Can you label all the states on an outline map? Do you know all the state capitals and state abbreviations? Go to this site to find out. Flash Player is needed.
Xpeditions Atlas: Printable black-outline maps are available for continents, countries, and states. This is part of the National Geographic website.

Articles by the Teachers' Mentor

Using Webquests