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Posted by: Danna Bell
The first post of this two-part series offered ten tips for filling classroom spaces with engaging primary source displays to promote systematic critical thinking. This second post lists ten ways to introduce primary sources into pedagogy. No matter your grade level or subject, the ten ideas start from this basic premise: For every lesson a primary source!
Posted in: Teaching Strategies
Posted by: Danna Bell
As your students look around their classroom environment, does a visually stimulating array of primary sources surround them? As a teacher, you can saturate your classroom with primary sources to promote critical thinking and inquiry.
Posted in: Teaching Strategies
Posted by: Danna Bell
In the October 2013 issue of Social Education, the journal of the National Council for the Social Studies, our “Sources and Strategies” article anticipated Veterans’ Day and suggested strategies for broadening student understanding of wartime experience through original works of art and personal accounts.
Posted in: Holidays, Teaching Strategies, Veterans and Military History
Posted by: Danna Bell
The Teaching with the Library of Congress blog regularly offers suggestions for helping students practice primary source analysis techniques. Since the launch of the interactive Primary Source Analysis Tool a year ago, thousands of students have analyzed maps, texts, photographs, political cartoons, and more the high tech way.
Posted in: Teaching Strategies
Posted by: Danna Bell
Like many readers of the Teaching with the Library of Congress blog, we have identified strategies related to the Common Core’s instructional “shift” toward integrating more informational texts into literacy programs. Today’s summer blog round-up pulls together five posts packed with ideas for using informational texts from the Library’s collections.
Posted in: Teaching Strategies, Teaching Tools
Posted by: Danna Bell
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.
Posted in: Development of the Industrial United States (1877-1914), Lesson Ideas, Teaching Strategies
Posted by: Danna Bell
“The Library of Congress means many different things to many people,” wrote Stephen Wesson at the start of the second year of the Teaching with the Library of Congress blog. “But for teachers and students it represents a source of discovery and learning unlike any other.” He noted that the first year of the blog had looked at a variety of topics and provided teaching suggestions that help unlock the potential of our unique primary sources.
Posted in: Lesson Ideas, Teaching Strategies