Best Free Teaching Resources for all Ages and Subjects in 2023

According to the U.S. Department of Education, teachers spend an average of $479 of their own money on classroom supplies per year. That’s why WeAreTeachers is all about free teaching resources. We’re always on the lookout for sites and sources that offer lesson plans, printables, videos, and all the other things teachers need to make their lives a little easier. Our list has options for pre-K through high school, in every subject. In short, there’s something for every teacher!

To start, we’ve got lots of terrific options right here on our site. Take a look at some of these top roundups. Then, be sure to browse the site for anything else you might need.

Now, on to the rest of the big list of free teaching resources!

Check out this site for both multimedia K-12 classroom resources and teacher professional development podcasts and learning activities.

Sample lessons: Art Through Time: A Global View, Amusement Park Physics Interactive, A Biography of America

Sponsored by the Kennedy Center, ArtsEdge provides arts-centered, standards-based resources for K-12.

Sample lessons: Animal Habitats, Five Artists of the Mexican Revolution, Creating Comic Strips

Nature activities, videos, games, DIY projects, and lessons to inspire children to explore and feel connected to the natural world.

Sample lessons: How To Make Hummingbird Nectar, Migration Story Interactive Game, Birds of Prey Poetry

Learn to code with these one-hour tutorials designed for learners of all ages in over 45 languages.

Sample lessons: Dance Party for grades 2+, Tractor Traversal for grades 6+, Space Adventure Code Monkey for grades 2-8

Free collection of reading passages in all literary and nonfiction genres for grades 3-12. Passages come with text-dependent questions that help you track student progress.

Sample lessons: Life Isn’t Fair—Deal With It, Who Was Anne Frank?, Witchcraft in Salem

Use this site for help teaching digital citizenship, and learn about the latest ed-tech.

Sample lessons: Your Rings of Responsibility, Keeping Games Fun and Friendly, Digital Drama Unplugged

The Core Knowledge Foundation provides open access to content-rich curriculum materials for preschool through grade 8, including the Core Knowledge Curriculum Series™.

Sample resources: Social Skills Posters, The Human Body, Ancient Egypt

This is one of the most well-known research labs for birds and birding. They’ve got a quality selection of activities and lessons, with K-12 options.

Sample lessons: Investigating Evidence, BirdSleuth Investigator, Flap to the Future

Student-appropriate news articles, with original and simplified options. You can also listen to the article, a terrific option for struggling readers.

Sample articles: Electreon Wants To Transform Roadways Into Charging Stations, Meet the New Millipede Species Named After Taylor Swift, Guess What? Fish Can Do Basic Math!

Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, this site provides tons of materials on teaching classic literature like Moby Dick or Lord of the Flies. You’ll also find lots of great resources for social studies, civics, and language arts.

Sample lessons: Examining Utopia & Dystopia in The Giver, Hopi Poetry, The Realism in Magical Realism

With lots of printable worksheets and activity ideas, this site is a must-bookmark for teachers. You’ll get a limited amount of free resources each month. Or you can sign up for a very affordable membership for unlimited access.

Sample activities: Math Crossword Puzzle, Firework Science, Understand Volume Using Sugar Cubes

Education World is a complete online resource for teachers, administrators, and school staff to find high-quality and in-depth original content. They offer more than 1,000 free lessons.

Sample lessons: Wacky Weather, What Would Oprah Say?, Changes in Habitat

EVERFI offers free digital courses that are interactive and standards-based. The focus is on real-world learning, with courses offered in financial literacy, STEM, social-emotional learning, health, and wellness.

Sample lessons: FutureSmart—Middle School Financial Education, The Compassion Project, Honor Code Bullying Prevention Curriculum

Games, books, videos, and printables for kids in grades pre-K to 8, all free! Resources are broken down by grade level, making it easy to find what you need.

Sample resources: What on Earth, Inkster, Penguin Drop

Textbook publisher Houghton Mifflin Harcourt has compiled a big collection of activities for grades K-12. Activities, lessons, downloadables, videos, and more!

Sample resources: My Number Story, 90-Second Science, How To Write for TV

Jumpstart offers free teaching materials, including activities, worksheets, and lesson plans, for K-5 teachers.

Sample lessons: What a Wonderful World, Art of Recycling, Power Up Math

Teachers everywhere rely on Khan for practice lessons and enrichment for their students. They have an especially robust high school section, with AP prep on a variety of topics.

Sample lessons: AP/College US History, Growth Mindset Activities, Intro to Multiplication

Formerly named Teaching Tolerance, this amazing site provides free resources that emphasize social justice and anti-bias to K-12 educators.

Sample lessons: Lessons From Goldilocks, Singing for Peace, Making Cents of Privilege

Teach kids the proper way to use primary sources with lessons. Then, use the primary source sets here for research on lots of topics.

Sample lessons: Getting Started With Primary Sources, Alexander Hamilton Primary Source Set, Baseball Across a Changing Nation Set

LDC is a national community of educators that provides literacy-rich assignments and courses (organized by collection) across content areas.

Collections include: K-6 Civics Collection, National Writing Project Collection, NBCT Authors

Search hundreds of resources by subject, grade level, type, and keyword. These lesson plans and teaching materials support K-12 STEM curriculum. Includes a wide variety of at-home lessons as well.

Sample lessons: Explore Mars: A Mars Rover Game, Make a Balloon-Powered Nanorover, Parachute Code Message

Teachers can borrow teaching packets and DVDs for a whole school year! Plus find lots of online help for teaching art.

Sample lessons: Elements of Art: Shape, Rousseau in the Jungle, Gordon Parks Photography

Bring National Geographic to your classroom through lesson plans, maps, and reference resources. Don’t miss Explorer Magazine, their free online publication for grades K-5.

Sample lessons: Wild Horses of the Outer Banks, El Nino, Traces of Ancient Rome in the Modern World

In addition to lesson plans, the free teaching resources here include National History Day projects and the Suffrage Resource Center.

Sample lessons: Songs of Protest, African American Activists, Little Rock Nine

Nature Lab is the Nature Conservancy’s youth curriculum platform, which provides lesson plans, videos and activities, and virtual field trips.

Sample lessons: How Dirt Works, Fighting Fire With Fire, Recording the Rainforest

Teach and learn with the Times. Articles and questions, writing prompts, and lesson plans that coordinate with the New York Times Learning Network for teens. This site also provides access to professional growth resources and webinars for teachers, plus activities for students.

Sample lessons: 28 Ways To Teach and Learn About Poetry, Listen to Five of the World’s Newest, Wildest Instruments, 19 Ways To Teach the 19th Amendment

Newsela is a database of current events stories tailor-made for classroom use. Stories are both student-friendly and available in different formats by reading level.

Sample texts: Checking the Facts About U.S. Birthright Citizenship, The Human Heart as a Work of Art, Helping Endangered Lemurs Hang On

National Science Teaching Association promotes excellence and innovation in science teaching and learning for all. This site gives teachers access to NSTA magazines for students and teachers and lesson plans.

Sample lessons: Slippery Slide Design, Figure Skating Physics, Wolves in the Wild

Whatever you’re teaching, chances are you’ll find helpful lesson plans, activities, printables, texts, and more on OER Commons. Hubs and Groups give teachers a chance to connect and collaborate too.

Sample lesson: 1619 Project: The Idea of America, The 1992 L.A. Civil Unrest, Natural Disasters: Weather Bingo

It’s no secret that textbooks are incredibly pricey. OpenStax is out to change that by providing quality digital texts for free.

Sample books: Calculus, World History, Sociology

Free, standards-aligned pre-K-12 instructional resources including lesson plans, videos, and interactives.

Sample lessons: What Happens When a Language Dies?, The Origami Revolution, The Spread of Disease

Recycle Rally is a terrific free program that helps schools set up a recycling program and offers rewards for participation. Their Resource Library has lots of free articles, printables, and activities.

Sample lessons: Lesson Plan: Don’t Waste Lunch!, Amazing Recycling Facts You Probably Don’t Know, How To Make a Tote Bag From a T-Shirt

Get leveled reading passages with accompanying vocab and question sets for K-8. Teachers get free access to use with their students.

Sample articles: Warriors of New Zealand, Rituals for Making Tea, Life Story: Zora Neale Hurston

NCTE’s site has thousands of standards-based resources for teachers and students of English.

Sample lessons: Color Poems—Using the Five Senses to Guide Pre-Writing, Teaching About Story Structure Using Fairy Tales, A Blast From the Past With Nuclear Chemistry

Free teaching resources by grade, including articles, book lists, and collections of lesson plans and teaching ideas.

Sample resources: Tips for Teaching Poetry, The Best Collections for Your Next Author Study, Our Favorite Graphic Organizers for Teaching Reading and Writing

You already know YouTube has lots of great videos to use with your students. But not all schools allow access to the site. That’s where SchoolTube comes in. Share videos safely, and get content you can trust.

Sample content: Math With Mr. J, Vicki Cobb’s Science Channel, TeacherCast Educational Network

Choose from hundreds of videos, STEM challenges, and lesson plans. Also, find a vast collection of hands-on science experiments and projects for K-12.

Sample lessons: What Animals Need to Survive, Engineering Design Challenge—Paper Airplanes, Paper Roller Coasters: Kinetic and Potential Energy

Seacoast Science Center’s Your Learning Connection is packed with lessons, activities, and resources to support at-home learning and empower children to investigate nature. Each weekly issue explores four themes—Get Outside!, Our Ocean, STEM Activities, and Art & Nature—with lessons, videos, and activity sheets.

Sample lessons: Honeycomb Moray Eel, Star Gazing, Nature Scavenger Hunts

Share My Lesson houses over 420,000 free lesson plans and activities, organized by grade and topic.

Sample lessons: Who Wants To Be a Millionaire? Stories, Coordinates and Straight Line Graphs, The Effect of the Population Explosion

Smithsonian’s History Explorer offers hundreds of free, innovative online resources for teaching and learning K-12 American history.

Sample lessons: The Suffragist, Winning World War II, Many Voices, One Nation

This award-winning children’s literacy website streams videos featuring celebrated actors reading children’s books alongside creatively produced illustrations.

Sample books: Trombone Shorty, Enemy Pie, Henry Holton Takes the Ice

The Lesson Plans section of this site has real plans created and designed by K-12 teachers. Search by subject or grade level.

Sample lessons: Chinese New Year, Camouflage and Environment, Classroom Garden From Trash

Free standards-aligned lessons and interactive whiteboard activities products created by teachers for teachers.

Sample lessons: A Tale of Two Towns, Making Decisions With Probability, Translating Confucius

There’s such a wide selection here, way beyond lesson plans! Get hall passes, graphic organizers, rubrics, and lots of other useful free teaching resources.

Sample lessons: Polar Powers: Animal Adaptations, Patterns in Music and Math, The Rights of Bike Riders

TpT allows teachers to share their knowledge with their colleagues and make money doing it. There are many paid options, but you’ll find lots of freebies available too.

Sample free lessons: Word Work Activities, Hundreds Charts Printables, A-Z Handwriting Practice

If you’re looking for resources to help build social justice in your school and community, start here. You’ll find books, lesson plans, activities, and more.

Sample resources: Anti-Bias Education, Black Lives Matter at School, Challenge Islamophobia

TES (Times Educational Supplement) is a British website that offers thousands of free and paid resources for K-12 teachers. Made by teachers for teachers.

Sample lessons: Persuasive Writing Travel Brochures, Romeo and Juliet Review Lessons, Rainforest Introduction Lesson

Help kids learn about money: where it comes from, how it works, and how to manage it. There’s a free mobile app to try out too.

Sample lessons: Money Scavenger Hunt, Working With Words, You’d Be Surprised videos

Calling all math teachers! This site has over 1,500 video lessons covering Middle Grades Math through Algebra 2.

Sample videos: What Is Probability?, What Is Place Value?, How Do You Find the Area of a Rectangle?

The World Wildlife Fund’s mission is to protect the world’s most beloved species and their habitats. Find games, videos, lessons, tool kits, and more.

Sample lessons: Sea Turtle Toolkit, Be a Food Waste Warrior, The Endangereds

Since 1978, the institute has been working with top-notch teachers and collecting their lesson materials for others to use. This site has thousands of complete units on pretty much any topic, all completely free to access and use.

Sample lessons: The Wonder Behind The Wizard of Oz, The Counting Train: Windows to Mexico, Anime and the Art of Storytelling

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