I don't know if this the right subreddit to be asking, but I am trying to work with the new Common Core State Standards to make writing about History and Social Sciences more engaging. I focused the majority of my research on the cultural context of The Adventures of Tintin, and was able to use that to make a good project on pre-WWII China, but I am looking for some other sources that can be analyzed for historical context. Does anybody have any advice on other topics and sources I can use to make a project out of? Context: I teach a sixth, seventh, and eighth grade cultural geography class that is completely open ended.
I honestly don't know what's fun with middle schoolers these days, but the University of Illinois has a "Teaching with Digital Content" project you might find useful, here are lesson plans and here's the digital content collection.
I don't know what middle schoolers find fun either, but there are some fantastic cultural sources on the ancient near east available via http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/(warning: Incredibly fussy website; a lot of the links may be a bit funny). I'd single out the Assyrian Empire Builders(http://www.ucl.ac.uk/sargon/) and Knowledge and Power in the Neo-Assyrian Empire(http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/saao/knpp/) because they provide a large base of sources in the form of Assyrian imperial correspondence along with a lot of support and background material to help explain how the sources fit in with the workings of the Assyrian Empire and Assyrian court culture (the Knowledge and Power website is more culturally-oriented, while the Assyrian Empire Builders is more on administration and the mechanics of empire). The websites are mostly intended for college undergraduates but you may be able to use them as a base from which to draft more age-appropriate lesson plans.