Place-based learning can make planning, geography, design, and social studies education more interesting to kids. The same is true of America's historic places. They put a "face" on the fascinating history that that made them historic.

Teaching with Historic Places, an award-winning program from the National Park Service, brings those places to schools around the country. The program features 130 classroom-ready lesson plans based on historic properties located in all 50 states plus the Midway Islands. The properties are all listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

The lessons explore places associated with women's and African American history, the Homestead Act, Pearl Harbor and the USS Arizona Memorial, Thomas Edison, and Eleanor Roosevelt, to name a few.

Yet they tell more than just the story of notable people, events, and places in American history. They give a glimpse into how we used to plan communities, use land, farm, engage in politics, travel, and build buildings. The history of these practices inform present-day community planning, agriculture, archaeology, architecture, civic engagement, conservation, landscape architecture, politics and government, and transportation.

These lessons bring historic places to life in the classroom through maps, readings, primary documents, historic and modern photographs, and other materials.

For more information, visit the Teaching with Historic Places website or email nr_twhp@nps.gov.

(Original article written by Ramona Mullahey in July 1999. Edited June 2007.)