A few years ago I visited the National WWII Museum in New Orleans. If ever have a chance to visit, take it! I spent about five hours in the museum and I would have spent ten hours in it if I’d had the time. I wish that every student could visit the National WWII Museum, but that’s not possible. Fortunately, the museum does offer some good online resources for teachers and students. 

The National WWII Museum’s online resources include seventy lesson plans and more than fifty distance learning videos. The lesson plans are available for free to any teacher who registers for a free account on the museum’s WWII Classroom website. 

The WWII Classroom lesson plans are divided into five thematic sections. Those sections are War in Europe, War in the Pacific, The Home Front, Real World Science, and Liberation & Legacy. All of the lesson plans are available to download as PDFs. Many of the lesson plans include the use of primary sources. In those cases the PDFs include digital copies of the primary sources to distribute to your students. The lesson plans also include links to additional supporting resources like videos and audio files. 

In addition to the lesson plans available on the WWII Classroom lesson plan pages you’ll find related videos if you scroll to the bottom of the page. The videos, like the lesson plans, are organized into the themes of War in Europe, War in the Pacific, The Home Front, Real World Science, and Liberation & Legacy.

With a free account on the WWII Classroom site you can save resources in your account for quick access at any time. Unfortunately, there aren’t any direct integrations with popular learning management systems so you’ll have to manually upload or link to resources in the LMS that your school uses.