Resources for Teaching Westward Expansion

If you’re teaching about Westward Expansion this fall, we have a variety of primary sources and online teaching activities to add to your toolkit.

You can find a variety of primary sources related to Westward Expansion before and after the Civil War on DocsTeach, our online tool for teaching with documents.

We have primary sources for:

• The Homestead Act
• The Transcontinental RR
• Mining
• Federal American Indian removal policies
• Reservations

We also have a variety of already-made activities that your students can complete online, or that you can walk through together as a class.

For example, what is this and what role did it play in Westward Expansion?

You and your students can find out on DocsTeach in an activity that uses the “White Out/Black Out” tool.

Teacher Instructions can be found here. Here is the direct link to the student activity.

Here’s another patent activity for Westward Expansion. Can your students identify this invention with roots in the frontier of the American West in January 1871? 

Teacher Instructions can be found here. Here is the direct link to the student activity.

You can find several more primary source-based online activities that students can actively engage with to learn about Westward Expansion on DocsTeach.