May is Physical Fitness Month. Based on America’s popular culture obsession with physical fitness, one might be tempted to label fitness as a modern phenomenon. Primary sources hardly come to mind, but in fact, students can discover a rich and extensive history of physical fitness through the collections of the Library of Congress.
Common Core State Standards, and many state content standards, emphasize reading informational text. Explore primary sources from the Library of Congress to discover informational text in many formats--including some formats that might surprise you.
While it may not be possible to bring your students to the Library of Congress to research in the physical collections, the robust collections available at LOC.gov offer myriad opportunities to expand and enrich your lessons without leaving your school
When we ask teachers how they use primary sources, they often have rich and creative answers about how they hook students’ attention, deepen understanding, and even review concepts and content. We hear less about assessment, and most of the responses are questions about how to construct assessments using primary sources.
The Stanford History Education Group has created formative assessments using primary sources from the Library of Congress. With these tools, teachers can gauge students’ historical understanding and ability to apply critical thinking skills by evaluating their analysis of primary source materials.The Spring 2013 issue of the TPS Journal, an online publication focused on pedagogical approaches to teaching with the Library’s digitized primary sources in K-12 classrooms, looks at how a teacher can assess not only content knowledge, but also critical thinking skills.
Baseball still holds a special place in the culture of the United States. As this year's season opened around the nation's capital we began to see more and more people wearing baseball caps, shirts and jackets with their team's favorite logo. Though baseball has been a part of the culture of the United States for many years, not all were allowed to play in the major leagues.
Men who endeavored to cross Antarctica on wooden skis are featured in the photos taken nearly 100 years ago by one man, Frank Hurley. They were part of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition of 1914, led by Sir Ernest Shackleton
Primary sources are original documents and objects which were created at the time under study. We know that primary sources can show a certain point of view or a certain perception about an event. But students may not think about the reasons why a particular primary source was created.
