Organization and Use of Site: Units | Worksheets | Lesson Plans
National Standards for History, Geography, and Science
Permissions and Fair Use
Welcome to Exploring the West, a project of the Bill Lane Center for the Study of the North American West at Stanford University. Exploring the West is a high-school curriculum geared to expanding and enriching students’ perceptions of the West.
Exploring the West contains worksheets and lesson plans that present the West as a contemporary, diverse, transnational, and dynamic region. The curricular units teach students that the West has been shaped by policy and environmental factors, as well as by history and popular myth.
Exploring the West is designed for students in grades 9-12. The worksheets and lessons vary in difficulty, and we encourage teachers to explore the site for material suitable for their students’ particular needs.
Exploring the West is organized into three broad units of curriculum: Urban Growth, Maps, and Cowboys. Each unit contains dozens of printable worksheets and lesson plans.
Each curricular unit addresses a major theme in Exploring the West.
The first theme is regional variation, which challenges the notion of a homogenous West, and seeks to highlight environmental, economic, demographic, and historical differences between different regions in the geographic West. The Urban Growth unit teaches students about the similarities and differences between the expanding metropolitan regions of Phoenix, Arizona, the Bay Area, California, and Calgary, Alberta.
The second theme is space, which emphasizes the notion that geographic regions are imagined spaces, whose borders and salient features are a matter of perspective and historical circumstance. The Maps unit explores the role that mapmakers have played in defining and imagining the West.
The third theme is popular culture, which asks students how their conceptions of the West have been shaped by movies and popular myth. The Cowboys unit teaches students how to think critically about popular representations of the West, using images from movies, literature, advertisements, and other sources of popular culture.
Exploring the West contains over 100 worksheets, which are stand-alone pieces of curriculum. The worksheets emphasize critical reading and analysis. Depending on the content, a worksheet may contain an excerpt from scholarly research, a primary or secondary historical source, a graph or chart, a map, or an image from popular culture. Questions at the bottom of the worksheet push students to read carefully and interpret the text.
For each worksheet, you may download a pdf, print an html version, or email the specific page link.
Each unit contains 7-10 lesson plans that last anywhere from one to four days (assuming a 50-minute period). Each lesson plan is built around several of the worksheets, and addresses a distinct theme or concept in the unit. Occasionally, a worksheet may have been incorporated into more than one lesson plan; however, because each lesson plan addresses a distinct concept, a teacher may feel free to teach all of the lesson plans, without any fear of redundancy.
Exploring the West is an interdisciplinary site that has been designed with the express purpose of enriching and building upon the traditional high school curriculum. Still, we recognize and understand the need for teachers to align curriculum with national standards. In the chart below, we outline the history, geography, and science standards that we believe are addressed by each curricular unit. We base this chart on the National Standards for History (1996), the National Geography Standards (1994), and the National Science Education Standards (1996). Though not included in the chart below, we believe that many of the writing assessments in the individual lesson plans address English Language Arts Standards, as well.
| Urban Growth | National Standards for History |
| Standards for Historical
Thinking:
Standard 1: Chronological Thinking (A, B, C, F) Standard 2: Historical Comprehension (A, B, C, D, E, F) Standard 3: Historical Analysis and Interpretation (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, J) Standard 4: Historical Research Capabilities (A, C, D) Standard 5: Historical Issues-Analysis
and Decision Making (A, B, C, D, E, F) United States History Standards Era 4: Expansion and Reform (1801-1861) (1B, 2B, 2E) Era 6: The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900) (1D) Era 9: Postwar United States (1945 to early 1970s) (1A, 1B) Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to present) (2B, 2E) | |
| National Geography Standards | |
| Standard 1: Use Maps
and other Geographic Representations . . . to Acquire, Process, and
Report Information from a Spatial Perspective
Standard 2: Use Mental Maps to Organize Information about People, Places, and Environments in a Spatial Context Standard 3: Analyze the Spatial Organization of People, Places, and Environments on Earth’s Surface Standard 4: The Physical and Human Characteristics of Places Standard 5: That People Create Regions to Interpret Earth’s Complexity Standard 6: How Culture and Experience Influence People’s Perceptions of Places and Regions Standard 8: The Characteristics and Spatial Distribution of Ecosystems on Earth’s Surface Standard 12: The Processes, Patterns, and Functions of Human Settlement Standard 13: How the Forces of Cooperation and Conflict Among People Influence the Division and Control of Earth’s Surface Standard 14: How Human Actions Modify the Physical Environment Standard 15: How Physical Systems Affect Human Systems Standard 16: The Changes that Occur in the Meaning, Use, Distribution, and Importance of Resources Standard 17: How to Apply Geography to Interpret the Past Standard 18: How to Apply Geography to Interpret the Present and Plan for the Future | |
| National Science Education Standards | |
| Earth and Space Science:
Content Standard D (Energy in the earth system)
Science in Personal and Social Perspectives: Content Standard F (Population growth, Natural resources, Environmental quality, Natural and human-induced hazards, Science and technology in local, national, and global challenges) | |
| Cowboys | National Standards for History |
| Standards for Historical
Thinking:
Standard 1: Chronological Thinking (A, B, C, F) Standard 2: Historical Comprehension (A, B, C, D, E, G) Standard 3: Historical Analysis and Interpretation (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J) Standard 4: Historical Research Capabilities (A, C, D)
United States History Standards Era 4: Expansion and Reform (1801-1861) (2E) Era 6: The Development of the Industrial United States (1870-1900) (1A, 1C, 3C) Era 10: Contemporary United States (1968 to present) (2D) | |
| National Geography Standards | |
| Standard 1: Use Maps
and other Geographic Representations . . . to Acquire, Process, and
Report Information from a Spatial Perspective
Standard 4: The Physical and Human Characteristics of Places Standard 5: That People Create Regions to Interpret Earth’s Complexity Standard 6: How Culture and Experience Influence People’s Perceptions of Places and Regions Standard 14: How Human Actions Modify the Physical Environment Standard 15: How Physical Systems Affect Human Systems Standard 16: The Changes that Occur in the Meaning, Use, Distribution, and Importance of Resources Standard 17: How to Apply Geography to Interpret the Past | |
| Maps | National Standards for History |
| Standards for Historical
Thinking:
Standard 1: Chronological Thinking (A, B, C, F) Standard 2: Historical Comprehension (A, B, C, D, E, G) Standard 3: Historical Analysis and Interpretation (A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J) Standard 4: Historical Research Capabilities
(A, C, D) United States History Standards Era 1: Three Worlds Meet (Beginnings to 1620) (1A, 1B, 1D, 2A, 2B) Era 2: Colonization and Settlement (1585-1763) (1B, 2C) Era 4: Expansion and Reform (1801-1861) (1A, 1B, 1C, 2A, 2E) Era 6: The Development of the Industrial
United States (1870-1900) (4A, 4B) World History Standards Era 6: The Emergence of the First Global Age (1450-1770) (1A, 1B, 2A, 2C, 4A, 6) Era 7: An Age of Revolutions (1750-1914) (5A, 5B, 6) Era 8: A Half-Century of Crisis and Achievement (1900-1945) (1A) | |
| National Geography Standards | |
| Standard 1: Use Maps
and other Geographic Representations . . . to Acquire, Process, and
Report Information from a Spatial Perspective
Standard 2: Use Mental Maps to Organize Information about People, Places, and Environments in a Spatial Context Standard 3: Analyze the Spatial Organization of People, Places, and Environments on Earth’s Surface Standard 4: The Physical and Human Characteristics of Places Standard 5: That People Create Regions to Interpret Earth’s Complexity Standard 6: How Culture and Experience Influence People’s Perceptions of Places and Regions Standard 12: The Processes, Patterns, and Functions of Human Settlement Standard 13: How the Forces of Cooperation and Conflict Among People Influence the Division and Control of Earth’s Surface Standard 14: How Human Actions Modify the Physical Environment Standard 17: How to Apply Geography to Interpret the Past |
All of the material on this site is provided exclusively for educational purposes, in accordance with the “fair use” provision of the United States Copyright Law.
We have made every effort to provide full citations for all of the images and texts on this site. Any use of the material on this site for purposes other than those protected by the “fair use” provision risks prosecution for copyright infringement.
