Welcome
This portion of the California for Educators website is dedicated to Los Angeles, Ventura and Orange Counties. Teachers and student from the region can access resources here designed to help them learn and teach about the Southland.
Pre-service teachers and college instructors taking or teaching courses on California and the Southland may also find these resources useful.
To get started click on a link in the list on the left.
Look for maps of Southern California's physical and human geography, historical events and other useful ideas for lesson plans and classroom discussions.
Coming soon, a textbook just for kids in Southern California about the Southland itself.
We wrote the book on Southern California
This website began as an addendum to a textbook constructed to help students and teachers in the Southland learn and teach specifically about the Southland. This text is a departure from most 3rd grade texts which lack the local focus called for in the California content standards for third graders.
The book should be ready for comment in Spring 2008, and ready for classroom use in Fall 2009
What's in the book?
Two main things will make this text different from other third grade social studies texts. First its topical focus is squarely aimed at local history, geography and economics, quite unlike those currently in wide usage across the area that are written for all of California, with the expectations that local teachers and locals students fill in the blanks created by the generic scope of their construction.
Second, a firm belief that learning how to do history and geography is more valuable than simply learning about history and geography. This text has all the requisite encyclopedia-style content necessary in a text, but also feature numerous opportunities for students to engage in the problem-solving processes used by historians, geographers and economists who study the Southland.
In the age of near-instantaneous access to facts about places and events, the ability to find, evaluate and interpret this information has become far more important.
