No matter what your style of teaching, IXL fits with your lesson plans! We previously shared some ideas for implementing IXL science in your classroom, and now we’d like to suggest some ways to engage students with social studies using IXL.

For an in-class lesson

Project an IXL history skill on the board to jumpstart a lesson! As you go through the skill as a whole class, the portraits, first hand accounts, and drawings from the time period will supplement your instruction and keep students’ interest piqued in what history looked like.

To reinforce instruction

IXL also works after you’ve already taught a lesson! Expose your students to the relevant content first and then have them practice on IXL for homework or in the computer lab. This will help students strengthen their understanding of the topic and give them ample opportunities to recall the facts and knowledge you covered with them.

In a flipped classroom

If you teach in a flipped classroom, IXL social studies complements instruction well. Rather than having your students read a textbook to gain the necessary background knowledge, students can learn from IXL. Since many of our questions are based on reasoning rather than memorization, students can take a first pass through a skill and read explanations as they go. And, students are able to retry variations of the questions they’ve missed, so they can succeed the second time through, if not the first.

To improve reading comprehension

Many of the social studies questions are also good practice for reading! Through IXL, students are asked to read, analyze, and interpret primary sources. As they learn about history, students will develop greater reading comprehension and critical thinking skills—skills they can apply across disciplines.