The Library of Congress web site has a wealth of resources that may be helpful to you and to your students. Here are just a few suggestions…
Your first stop should be the Science Reference Section’s web page. One fun resource you will see is their Everyday Mysteries project with “mysteries” like Why is it hot in the summer and cold in the winter? and Does your heart stop when you sneeze? Their home page will also lead you to the many guides the staff has created. There is even a direct link for Students & Teachers which includes links to guides on :
- Biographies of Women Scientists: For Girls and Young Women
- Environmental Science Projects
- Family Fun! Discovering Science at the Library of Congress
- Girls & Science Education: How to Engage Girls in Science
- Resources for Teachers
- School Gardens: A Guide to Selected Resources
- School Gardening Activities: A Guide to Selected Resources
- Science Education (Science Tracer Bullet)
- Science Education in the 21st Century
- Science Fair Projects
- Space Science Projects
- Teaching Astronomy and more
Library blogs are also great. This blog has done many food and gardening related posts that teachers may find useful, but there is also the Teaching with the Library of Congress blog which has done a number of posts; here are a few:
- Primary Sources in Science Classrooms: Coal River and Human Impacts on Earth’s Systems
- Primary Sources in Science Classrooms: Severe Weather and Community Resilience
- Primary Sources in Science Classrooms: Dimensions of Water Quality
- Primary Sources in Science Classrooms: Microbeads, Nanomaterials, and Federal Legislation
- Primary Sources in the Science Classroom: Thomas Jefferson’s Proposed System of Weights and Measures
- New Science Primary Source Sets from the Library of Congress: Weather Forecasting and Scientific Data
- Analyzing Historical Weather Tools to Understand Core Scientific Concepts
- Primary Sources in Science Classrooms: Invasive Species and Historic Newspapers from Chronicling America
- 300 Years of Imaginary Space Ships: 1630-1920
- What’s Happening in Science Education
Newspaper & Current Periodicals has Topics in Chronicling America with a number of related topics like those on Darwin, Nicola Tesla, the Invention of the Telephone, Yosemite National Park, Halley’s Comet, etc. There are also a number of digitized sources including the Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers and American Environmental Photographs from 1891-1936.
One last resource I wanted to mention is the webcasts. The Science, Technology & Business Division has brought many speakers to the Library including a number from NASA, and many of the programs were webcast and available to you by going here or here.
In addition, I’d like to put in a plug for another resource, science.gov, which is an interagency site offering U.S. government science information from over 60 databases and 2200 selected websites from 15 federal agencies. While not a Library of Congress web page, Science librarians here at the Library have been involved with this project for many years.