Teacher in Residence Carolyn Bennett's recent blog post explored the sounds and functions of bugle calls as a form of communication for troops from a musical perspective. This post describes ways in which coding allows students to explore different aspects of these calls.
Imagine a noisy battlefield, encampment, or port city. A commander has hundreds of men. Wireless communications have not yet been invented. How do the troops receive orders and coordinate movements? During the Civil War, this was the role of the bugle.
This blog post from Folklife Today caught our eyes for the discussion of biases, assumptions, and cultural perspectives. How might your students respond to the twists and turns raised by this post?
Elementary students frequently learn about states of matter and may even build solar ovens or insulation boxes for experiments. While creating insulation boxes might seem to be a relatively simple science experiment today, methods such as these were once essential to providing safe food storage.
In the January-February 2019 issue of Social Education, the journal of the National Council for the Social Studies, our “Sources and Strategies” article discusses the Life of Omar ibn Said, the only known extant narrative written in Arabic by an enslaved person in the United States. Analyzing this unique manuscript provides students with an opportunity to expand their understanding of some of the people who were brought to the United States from Africa to be enslaved. How educated were they? What did they believe?
The Learning and Innovation Office of the Library of Congress is seeking applications from current K-12 Civics teachers for one Teacher-in-Residence position during the 2019-20 school year.
Students can understand more deeply and perform more authentically when they examine some of the threads bound up within a song's cultural history. "This Little Light of Mine" is a prime example: Predating the struggle for civil rights, it takes on new shades of meaning every time it is sung.
If students were asked the names of those who were active in the suffrage movement, they might list Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Alice Paul. It is less likely that they would name Mary Church Terrell.