New School Year Teacher Resources from UNC


One of the joys of being an educator is the excitement surrounding the start of a new school year. I remember the eagerness and nervousness of the first day of school that I felt as I young child. I still feel these emotions each year as I eagerly await meeting my new students and diving into our curriculum. In that spirit, I am delighted to welcome you back to school and share LEARN NC’s new resources with you.

For those of you looking for online professional development opportunities, we’ve listed over fifty online courses. Visit our course listings and see what we have to offer you!

Here at LEARN we have embarked upon our task of aligning all of LEARN NC’s online resources with the new curriculum standards. We will keep you updated as our work is published online.

We also have just updated our collections of CareerStart lesson plans for grades sixseven, and eight with an introductory article that addresses the program’s impressive research findings.  Take a look and see why schools that have implemented CareerStart have reported higher student engagement and improved test scores.

Many of you are familiar with our North Carolina digital textbook. We are currently working on an educator’s guide for 4th grade teachers. We look forward to sharing this resource with you later this year.

With the 10th anniversary of September 11, 2001 approaching, you may be thinking about how to approach the event in your classroom. We recently blogged about the National Museum of American History, National September 11 Memorial & Museum, Pentagon Memorial Fund, and Flight 93 National Memorial offering an online conference for K-12 teachers. The conference included roundtable discussions with content experts and six workshop sessions that shared strategies, ideas as well as resources, and encouraged conversations on how to document, preserve, and interpret recent history and current events. Teachers now can access archived sessions from the conference, along with K-12 lessons and activities from each organization and background information on September 11.

Many of you may have travelled parts of the Blue Ridge Parkway this summer. Whether or not you travelled the Parkway by car, bike, or foot you can now travel the Parkway virtually through UNC’s Driving Through Time: The Blue Ridge Parkway in North Carolina. Take a moment to linger along the overlooks and explore the history of our State through this online collection. Make sure to check-out the K-12 instructional resources.

Last but far from least, we are conducting a search to hire a new Executive Director of LEARN NC. The position description is posted on our web site. We hope you will help us identify a phenomenal new leader for our organization by encouraging qualified individuals to apply!

I wish you the very best as you launch your new school year!