A colleague and I were recently invited into a classroom at The River School in Washington, D.C., which provides "educational experiences for children and their families uniting the best practices of early childhood education and oral deaf education."
I had been looking for ways to integrate research skills for a fifth grade class that is currently studying space and motion. The new Library of Congress "Understanding the Cosmos" eBook gave a great selection of primary sources that could help support that topic.
One way for teachers to engage students with poetry is to connect poems and poets to historical events. Students gain a deeper appreciation of poets and their work when they can see snippets of the writer's life in the work.
What do scientists do? This simple prompt was central in one activity during the inaugural week-long Seminar for Science Educators held at the Library this summer.
One way to engage students with the wealth of maps available from the Library of Congress is to discuss their value as sources of information as well as means to find a location or plan a route.
Welcome (or welcome back!) to Teaching with the Library of Congress, where we hope you discover and discuss the most effective techniques for using Library of Congress primary sources in the classroom. We invite readers to engage with topics ranging from What Makes a Primary Source a Primary Source? to what's happening "next month in history?" Here are staff picks for places to start - or continue - teaching with primary sources.
In my first blog post as Teacher in Residence, I set a number of goals: to connect primary sources to literature, to create research questions to advance inquiry, and to foster library skills. I was able to meet these goals in a number of ways and to reach out to teachers and librarians with approaches to working with primary sources and teaching research skills.