I recently went to a Reading Like a Historian PD for 5th grade teachers. Kurt's post on Reading History Like a Historian mentions the Stanford website which contains hundreds of lessons. As I explored the website at the training, I didn't even realize they had World History lessons. The training also mentioned this website which is a digital library of primary sources geared toward World History. I think it'll be very useful for our lesson plans. I've already found a handful of sources I will likely use for my lessons on the Grand Canal.
http://www.wdl.org/en/