Free Resources Every Teacher Should Bookmark
Reviewed by Jon Konen, District Superintendent
Teachers are charged with educating our future leaders, doctors, lawyers, parents, and even the next generation of teachers. However, most teachers aren’t given the resources they need to help their students succeed. As a result, many teachers spend money out of their own pockets. In fact, teachers around the country spend an average of $459 per year on supplies for their classrooms, according to the National Education Association.
Luckily, there are a variety of free resources online designed to help teachers create an engaging, fun learning environment. The following free resources include lesson plans, audiobooks, worksheets, and other teaching resources to help you create an inspiring learning environment for students from Pre-K to through high school.
Free Classroom Printables
Creating a fun learning environment has never been easier, thanks to this list of free door decoration kits, holiday activities, posters, and worksheets.
We Are Teachers Free Printables
- Great for: All grades
- Overview: This online resource library offers tons of fun printable teacher resources, including door decoration kits, holiday activities, calendars, quotes, and much, much more.
- Why we love it: They offer far more than your standard black-and-white worksheets. There are tons of creative printables, which can be sorted by grade and topic.
Teach-nology Printable Worksheet Library
- Great for: All grades
- Overview: This site has more than 11,000 printable worksheets, lesson plans, and rubrics in PDF format. Worksheets are available for topics such as English, geography, critical thinking, early childhood, math, science, research skills, and more.
- Why we love it: In addition to the thousands of pre-made worksheets, they also share tools to help teachers create their own worksheets.
Teach Junkie: 27 Free Printable Posters
- Great for: Elementary to middle school grades
- Overview: Collection of 27 fun, colorful posters for every occasion, including reminders to wash your hands, how to work with a partner, and classroom rules.
- Why we love it: These posters make adding color and creativity to your classroom simple—and free.
TeacherVision Printable Worksheets
- Great for: All grades
- Overview: This is a resource-rich page with a multitude of free downloadable resources/templates for teachers organized by featured editor’s picks, school subjects, and resource type. Topics include art, music, drama, start charts, opinion writing, Arctic animals, fractions, and the Civil Rights movement.
- Why we love it: These ready-to-use worksheets help solidify concepts and test student comprehension on a wide range of topics in a variety of formats, including multiple-choice, essay, and matching.
- Great for: English Language Learners of all grades
- Overview: This site includes lessons, worksheets, and more for teachers who teach English as a Second Language students.
- Why we love it: The page offers a wide selection of creative worksheets, including grammar practice, word searches, songs, cinema and television, and much more. The forum allows teachers to interact and collaborate with colleagues from around the world.
Lesson Planning Resources
Not only are there printables to make your classroom brighter or to fulfill immediate lesson needs, but there are also free resources to assist with your time-consuming lesson planning.
Insect Anatomy and Life Cycle Lesson Plan | Scholastic
- Great for: Pre-K-Kindergarten
- Overview: These play-based lesson plans encourage students to invent their own insects, use them for dramatic play, and learn about the lifecycle of insects in a fun and interactive way
- Why we love it: This unique lesson plan helps students learn while keeping the lesson fun for younger students.
Coding Lesson Plans | Code.org
- Great for: All grades
- Overview: Large selection of coding lesson plans for students at all levels, including pre-reading students, unplugged lesson plans, and even high-school computer science lesson plans
- Why we love it: In addition to computer-based coding lessons, this list also includes unplugged lesson plans that do not require the use of a computer.
History Teaching Institute from The Ohio State University
- Great for: All grades
- Overview: History lesson plans covering a wide range of periods, including World War I, World War II, European History, The French Revolution, and the Holocaust
- Why we love it: This selection of lesson plans does more than just teach students to memorize events; it helps them look at past events critically to understand how those events continue to impact us today.
Native American Heritage Lesson Plans and Student Activities | Scholastic
- Great for: All grades
- Overview: This is a full resource library to help students understand the history, culture, and literature of Native Americans. Lesson plans cover topics such as the Navajo Code talkers, Native American games, and recipes.
- Why we love it: In addition to addressing topics that are often overlooked in traditional history textbooks, lessons are sortable by topic and grades. Plans include creative assignments such as writing a journal entry as if you were a Native American child and creating 3-D models.
- Great for: Middle and high school students
- Overview: Created by history teachers, these four lesson plan packs are detailed lesson plans for teaching students about women’s impacts on history. Lesson plans include Medieval Women, Early Modern Witchcraft, Georgian Women, and Muslim Women and Migration (20th)
- Why we love it: These plans dig deep into how women, in particular, were influential to and affected by historical events.
Winter Holidays Around the World
- Great for: All grades
- Overview: These plans help students of all ages explore the many holidays celebrated during the winter months around the world, including Christmas, Hanukkah, Saint Lucia Day, Kwanzaa, and Saint Nicholas Day.
- Why we love it: The lesson plans help inspire creating in addition to teaching students about cultures from around the world.
- Great for: All grades
- Overview: This is a massive library of lesson plans created “by educators for educators.”
- Why we love it: Lesson plans are easily searchable and split by education level and span from Pre-K through high school.
Library of Congress Classroom Materials Resource Collection
- Great for: All grade levels
- Overview: This comprehensive collection includes primary source lists in the Library as well as lesson plans, presentations, activities, and historical context lessons.
- Why we love it: Lessons can be sorted by state standards.
Free Resources for Elective Courses
If you are an elective teacher, you know how challenging it is to find resources for your classroom—particularly at a reasonable cost or for free! This selection of unpaid resources is designed to help teachers inspire and engage their students in topics outside of core classes like math, science, reading, and history.
- Great for: Theatre educators of all grades
- Overview: This site offers a wide range of theater resources, including playwriting exercises, monologues, directing resources, performance tips, and video tips.
- Why we love it: Lessons are sorted by topic, making it easy to find a plan for your classroom.
- Great for: Art teachers of all levels, from Pre-K to College
- Overview: A vast range of resources to inspire creativity and teach about art, including downloadable images, lesson plans, activities, and online courses
- Why we love it: Created by the National Gallery of Art, these lesson plans also support visits to the Gallery in D.C.
- Great for: Teachers for students of all ages and musical abilities
- Overview: A free resource library that includes songs, music, and creative lesson plans for teachers
- Why we love it: In addition to songs, resources include behavior management assistance, concert theme ideas, and color by music worksheets.
Financial Literacy Lesson Plans | National Education Association
- Great for: Grades K-12
- Overview: Lesson plans, games, and other resources to help teachers prepare their students for life with lessons on using a checking account, budgeting, saving, bartering, and general financial literacy.
- Why we love it: The well-designed lesson plans cover lifelong skills.
Bloomsbury Fashion Central Lesson Plans
- Great for: Students from middle to high school
- Overview: These free lesson plans help students explore a variety of topics related to fashion, including Fashion and the Body, Celebrity Fashion, African Dress, and Knitwear around the world.
- Why we love it: These plans explore unique fashion topics and are all reviewed by industry and academic experts in the field of fashion.
eBooks, Audio Books, & Other Digital Libraries
No buts about it: books are expensive, especially when you have to buy them for all of your students. Help your learners expand their horizons with access to thousands of books, including international folktales, favorite children’s books, and significant works of literature.
International Children’s Digital Library
- Great for: Grades Pre-K-8
- Overview: This digital library provides access to digital books from a variety of countries and in multiple languages, including Serbian, Farsi, French, Chinese, Italian, and more.
- Why we love it: It offers a unique collection of fairy tales, folk tales, and other cultural stories. The sort features make it easy to find a book based on language, topic, age, and length.
- Great for: All grades, up to adult learning
- Overview: This site offers a massive library of teaching resources for science, humanities, law, history, and nearly any other topic you can imagine.
- Why we love it: The ability to sort by education level (up to adult) and by state requirements makes it easy to find resources that work for your classroom.
Spotify Children’s Audiobook Library
- Great for: K-5th grade
- Overview: A library of children’s books in audio format, including Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Jungle Book, and Rapunzel.
- Why we love it: In addition to being free, audiobooks can be a fantastic way to expose students to a broader range of literature.
- Great for: Readers of all levels
- Overview: The Gutenberg Project is a free collection of more than 60,000 ebooks (most which are no longer under copyright), including classic literature, educational books, and more.
- Why we love it: Totally free access to thousands of ebooks