As a new school year gets underway, we’d like to welcome you back to Teaching with the Library!
This blog is one of many ways in which the Library of Congress supports K-12 teachers and school librarians in the use of the Library’s rich online collections of primary sources. Primary sources are powerful tools for teaching and learning, and the Library offers photographs, films, maps, audio recordings, and newspapers that can be brought into classrooms across the curriculum.
Here are a few great places to start exploring:
- The Library’s portal for educators, LOC.gov/teachers, provides free teaching tools and professional development opportunities and is updated regularly throughout the school year. Primary source sets are a good entry point for investigating the Library’s online collections.
- The Teaching with the Library blog showcases primary sources and teaching ideas in brief, easy-to-use posts.
- The Library’s YouTube channel includes a playlist of teacher resources.
We’ve created and published a number of new resources over the past year:
- We’ve launched new primary source sets on the Civil Rights Movement, Inventions and Innovations, the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis and Clark Expedition, and Ecology.
- During her year at the Library, Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow Jackie Katz created not one, but two series of posts for science educators: Teaching Scientific Literacy and Launching Units with Primary Source Phenomena.
- We added new recordings to our collection of professional development webinars, including ideas for working with historic newspapers and fire insurance maps.
We’re always creating new resources for teachers, so watch this blog for announcements of the latest! And please let us know what you and your students do with the Library’s primary sources.