[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to another episode of the Social Studies Teacher podcast. This is the very last episode of season two. Believe it or not, we are rolling into a new season for season three beginning in June. So it's crazy to think that two seasons down and more to come. Today's episode's a little bit different since it is the end of the year.

[00:01:11] Kirsten: I know this is probably the last thing you're thinking of is social studies and just really any subject in general. So we're gonna make this a little fun episode, but it's still useful. Today we are going to be talking about teacher fonts. That is right, teacher fonts. Whether you're creating anchor charts or worksheets or slideshows or classroom decorations,

[00:01:32] the right font can make a big difference in readability, engagement, and classroom aesthetic. So I'm gonna be sharing with you my favorite fonts from Google Fonts, Microsoft Office, Canva, and TPT, why choice matters in your fonts for the classroom, and also where to find the best teacher friendly fonts for classroom decor or creating worksheets or just to keep in mind for next year.

[00:02:02] So if you love designing your own classroom materials, or you just wanna make your resources more student friendly, this episode is for you. Before we get started, I do wanna share with you a few links that I'm going to be referencing. The first one is my blog post that has gotten a lot of traction over the last five years, and for whatever reason, people just love to flock towards it

[00:02:26] so if you want to have all those fonts in one place, you can always check out that blog post. And I've also linked a couple of more sources. I have a blog post about how to best pair fonts so that it looks nice on your resources or your slideshows that you're creating for your social studies classroom or whatever

[00:02:48] subjects you're teaching. And I also have another source of how you can find Google fonts by the ladybug files. So I'm gonna link all of those and you can look at that in the show notes. Alright, before we get into my favorite fonts, let's talk about why font choice matters in the classroom. As teachers, we create a ton of materials either for ourself or for our team.

[00:03:12] You might have anchor charts or slideshows or worksheets and newsletters for your parents, and even social media graphics if you might share resources online. So I wanna share why choosing the right font is so important. Number one is the readability for students.

[00:03:28] Some fonts are easier to read, especially for emerging readers or students with dyslexia. Lexand is designed to improve reading fluency. It's specifically keeping that in mind. So I think just thinking about readability, you also want to make sure that if emerging readers aren't able to tell what letter is a capital letter versus a lowercase letter, you probably don't wanna add that in your teaching materials.

[00:03:56] Another reason that choosing the right font is important is professional engaging materials. The right font can make worksheets and presentations look polished and fun and easy to follow. It's best to avoid fonts that are too decorative or too hard to read 'cause yes, they might look cute and they're all script fonty and they're really just, they look really nice on maybe your teacher planner, but it may not translate well.

[00:04:25] It could be really distracting for students. So any of those really decorative or hard to read fonts maybe keep it for teacher purposes or PD purposes and limit it to having it for specifically your students. Another reason why choosing the right font is important is thinking about branding, classroom aesthetic.

[00:04:46] If you love a cohesive classroom, decor fonts can help set the tone, whether you like a modern look or a classic look or a playful, bright look. So now that we know why fonts matter, let's get into my favorite fonts for teachers. We're gonna start with Google Fonts because they are completely free and easy to use.

[00:05:08] You can literally go to fonts.google.com and any font you like, you can download and use for professional purposes. You can use for personal use in your classroom. You could even, if you wanna create resources and put it on teachers pay teachers, you could use it for commercial use. So as long as you don't say that, you know, you created that specific font and it's like, oh, I did it myself

[00:05:32] you can use it however you'd like. So I'm gonna share with you, just some ideas that you can use for Google Classroom, Google Docs, Google Slides. Here are some of my favorites. The first one I mentioned a little bit earlier, Lexand. It is perfect for student readability and it was specifically designed to help with reading fluency.

[00:05:53] It just is a really great way to use for student materials and for worksheet. I know some people don't like when the A is that fancy looking A and Lexend has the typical A where you've got the circle and the stick right next to it on the right side. I don't know how to describe it, but that's how I'm gonna do it for today.

[00:06:15] Also, I know some people like the little tails at the top and the bottom of I, and some fonts have it, some fonts don't, but Lexend does so you can rest assured that your nicely formed letters are usable with Lexend. Another one that you might wanna consider is called Jost. It's modern, it's clean, and it's great for PowerPoint slides or Google slides.

[00:06:38] There's also didact gothic. It's a simple sans serif font that is friendly and easy to read. Outfit is another one. This is a sleek and slightly rounded font that works well for labels and headers, classroom decor, and then there's a font called teacher, the name says it all. It's great for early learners and it mimics clear print handwriting.

[00:07:04] You can play around with it, and they do usually have different weights, so all of the fonts that I mentioned will have a bold version and different thinner versions so you can mix and match the different weights together to make it look nice. Google fonts, again, are great because they are free, easy to use, and work across most, if not all platforms.

[00:07:28] Alright, let's go into Microsoft fonts. This is a short list. If you're creating documents in Word or PowerPoint, these fonts will definitely make your materials look clean and professional. The biggest font that I use out of this is Century Gothic. This is pretty much my go-to. I use it on a lot of my resources.

[00:07:48] It's modern, easy to read, works well for both print and digital resources. It's great for labels, worksheets, newsletters, presentation slides, really the list is endless. Microsoft Office does have some other great built-in fonts, but for me, century gothic is one of the best for teachers. Now, Canva fonts,

[00:08:11] if you create classroom posters or fancy decor or digital resources in Canva, you know how important fonts are. Canva is great 'cause it has a ton of different options that you could use, whether you have the pro version or the free version, and I wanna share with you some of my favorites that you can pull in there.

[00:08:29] Century Gothic, pan-European. This is basically century gothic, but it's in Canva and it's great for classroom materials like I mentioned earlier. You've got poppins that you can find. This is a rounded sans serif font that's great on slides and posters, and it's also in Google fonts as well. Actually, I'm pretty sure all of the ones I'm about to mention are also a Google font, so you can find a lot of the Google fonts in Canva, which is really helpful.

[00:08:57] Quicksand is a friendly and soft font. A little bit more rounded. Works well for labels, classroom decor. Montserrat is more stylish if you're maybe a secondary teacher, or sixth grade, seventh grade. This is a fun, bold, stylish font for displays and headers. If you want something a little bit fancier and less playful and Glacial Difference is a nice clean one,

[00:09:23] great all-purpose font that is sleek and nice and clean, so it's easy to read. All of these are easy to read for both the teacher and the students. Next, we are going to talk about TPT fonts. Teachers Pay Teachers has a ton of fun and funky fonts that you can find and purchase or download for free and use for personal classroom use because

[00:09:49] if you are making resources for your class, or you might be selling it on TPT, you do want some additional fun and teacher friendly fonts that are unique to our teacher and educator world. So I'm gonna share with you some of my favorites from Teachers Pay Teachers. There's the KA font by Kaitlyn Albani.

[00:10:08] Some of my favorites include KA school notes or KA school days thin. This is great for clean and easy to read resources for elementary. It is very clear and neat. There's also bold and chunky KA honey and another bold and chunky that is called KA Joyful. And this is fun for headers and classroom posters and all that fun stuff.

[00:10:34] KG Fonts is a classic TPT font that has been around for many years by Kimberly Guess Wine. And all of her fonts can be downloaded pretty much for free. And if you ever wanna sell resources on TPT, you can purchase a license for each font. I think it's around $5 right now. So you could use her fonts in your resources, and if you ever want to sell those resources to other people, you can have that commercial license.

[00:11:04] You have KG neatly printed or KG blank space solid, KG part of me. These are clean, handwritten fonts that are great for classroom materials, and these are three of my favorites. So this is something you can always download for free and use in your classroom. Or if you wanna sell it, you can buy the commercial license.

[00:11:28] Lastly, I wanna mention AG fonts, Amy Grossbeck Fonts. These are really fun. Some of my favorites include AG I'm Extra, or AG sorry, not sorry. These two are bold, handwritten fonts that work well for worksheets and labels. If you want some fun cursive script fonts, I recommend AG Helicopter parents or AG rather be Sleeping solid, and I will make sure to link all three of these.

[00:11:56] If you look in my blog post, it should be already linked. But you'll see the store for the link for TPT, and you can look at each of the different products to see which fonts you might be interested in. There's a ton more that I didn't mention, and you might see one that you're really interested in, but I did wanna link all of their stores just for simplicity purposes.

[00:12:22] Otherwise, that would be a lot of overwhelming links. All of these TPT fonts are perfect for adding personality to your materials while also keeping things readable and student friendly. It's also great if you want to, you know, create some customized teacher notebook or teacher journal and print it out on nice paper.

[00:12:43] You can also find some really fun fonts for that as well. Alright, next I'm gonna share with you how to choose the right font for your classroom. We've talked about some of my favorite fonts that I love to use, and I wanna talk about how to choose the best ones for your needs. So simple guide for worksheets and student materials,

[00:13:04] make sure you're using simple and readable fonts. I recommend checking out those Canva fonts, Google fonts. For anchor charts and classroom decor, make it really bold. You can make it really fun, but still readable depending on what the purpose of the anchor chart in classroom decor is. Also for slideshows and presentations, you can use modern, easy to read fonts.

[00:13:27] Again, there's a ton that I've listed already here that you can always check out to make your slideshow or presentation interesting. So there you have it. Those are my favorite fonts for teachers. I'm gonna recap again for Google Fonts, lexend, Jost, Didact Gothic, Outfit, and my favorite Microsoft Office font, Century Gothic. Canva fonts, there's a lot in there that you can check out, but some I recommend are the Century Gothic pan-European font, poppins, Quicksand, Montserrat. And then for TPT fonts, you can check out KA fonts, KG fonts, and AG fonts. You could also, if you're just looking to explore fonts to see what's out there, you can go onto teachers pay teachers, and just simply type in fonts or filter by fonts, and you should be able to see a ton pop up that are really popular.

[00:14:22] Fonts will help make your worksheets, slides, and classroom materials look polished, engaging, and student friendly. Alright, well that wraps up season two of the Social Studies Teacher Podcast. If you are outta school or almost outta school, I can't wait to chat with you over the summer about a variety of topics.

[00:14:44] I have something fun planned for you and you'll see or hear about it very, very soon. Thanks again for listening, and I hope you have a wonderful rest of your week, and I will talk to you next week.