Welcome Back to Teaching with the Library

As a new school year begins, we’d like to welcome educators back to the classroom and back to Teaching with the Library!

This blog is part of the Library’s program for K-12 teachers and school librarians, and its mission is to help these educators discover and effectively use primary sources from the Library’s online collections. Primary sources — that is, original documents and objects that were created at the time under study — have unique instructional power and can help students engage with complex topics, build their critical thinking skills, and create new knowledge.

The Library makes millions of primary sources available to everyone everywhere for free on its website loc.gov, and its portal for teachers provides free teaching tools and professional development resources. Over the past year we’ve created a number of new resources to make it easier for educators to include the Library’s primary sources in instruction:

• New primary source sets on Informational Text, the Cold War, and Mass Persuasion Campaigns.
• A new self-paced professional development module on Copyright and Primary Sources.
• Two new videos featuring Jackie Katz, 2022-23 Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the Library of Congress: Primary Sources in a K-12 Classroom and An Extended Look at a Primary Source Learning Activity in a High School Science Classroom.

We’re always building new resources for teachers and have several ready to launch, so watch this blog to keep up with the latest. And let us know how we can support you this year as you continue the important work of teaching!

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