It’s that time of the year again, and no matter what help you need prepping for the school year, iCivics is here to help.

Are you an experienced teacher who has used iCivics for years? Or maybe a veteran teacher who is teaching civics for the first time? Or even a brand new teacher with no idea where to start? No matter where you’re at, iCivics has your back.

First things first, figure out what it is you need.

If you don’t know how you want to progress throughout your course (either because you have no starting point or want to change things up), check out the Scope and Sequence for your grade band. It can be overwhelming at first glance, so if you’re just getting started, avoid getting bogged down with all the topics in the units until you’ve built up a good frame. You can go back and place the topics, lessons, and games they have listed into whichever units you think they fit best with.

If you’ve already got a solid course outline and just want to tweak how you present a unit or add new related topics, check out the curriculum units. iCivics constantly adds new materials to these units. These materials come out so quickly that sometimes there is a delay between when they are released and when they are listed on the scope and sequence documents.

If you’re looking to simplify how you track student work and access iCivics resources, play around with their integration tools and set up your classes to find the most efficient ways to bring and manage iCivics to your classroom. It definitely beats repeatedly explaining to students how to take a screenshot of their game progress screens or dealing with a frustrated student who lost all their game progress because they weren’t signed in. You can still keep a nice blend of paper and digital assignments with these integrations, and they’re incredibly helpful for supporting absent students, multi-language learners, and facilitating a variety of accommodations and modifications to assignments.

If your focus is providing greater support for different groups of students or providing more variety in the instructional approaches you’re using, search the materials by resource type and pedagogical tags to find a variety of materials and supports to increase student engagement and differentiation. I know I’m going to be digging into their simulations and document-based questions this year as I’m looking to increase student engagement and primary source analysis skills.

If you’re looking for how to incorporate media literacy skills into your curriculum that hasn’t had the chance to catch up with rapidly changing technology, check out iCivics’ Media and Influence unit that can be applied across disciplines and is great for the start of the year to prepare students for more reflective analysis throughout the school year.

Lastly, if you’re looking for ways to make civic learning more accessible for other teachers and students’ families, check out iCivics’ information pages that provide detailed resources on how they can support teacher professional growth throughout the school year and help keep families connected and informed about what civics looks like and why it matters that their students engage deeply and meaningfully in their learning.

I hope that no matter where you’re starting, you know iCivics has your back with high-quality, nonpartisan resources to bring civics alive for your students this school year!