The Library of Congress Summer Institute taught me a new and surprising lesson about what primary sources offer to any curriculum, including my AP Psychology classes.
Primary sources from the Library of Congress are powerful tools for engaging students and fostering natural curiosity. You can help students learn to harness that curiosity in ways that will focus and direct research.
The Library of Congress Summer Teacher Institute matched my experience with the Writing Project, and refined and drew focus to everything I have learned as a teacher.
The @TeachingLC Twitter feed for K-12 educators shares rich primary sources and teaching materials every school day. Learn about the #LCReveal, where a primary source is deconstructed and tweeted one section a day for a weeklong, classroom-ready activity.
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!
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.
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.
These resources offer an enormous variety of choices and unleash students' imaginations as to how they want to tell the story. We start with the available analysis tool and teacher’s guides and work from those to expand our projects.
Kids of any age enjoy playing Hide and Seek. It all starts with the very young playing "peekaboo", discovering their own view of the world and their place in it.
Vary the game with any visually rich primary source, such as Mulberry Street, for a quick but worthwhile classroom activity. A quick scan of this print reveals a crowd on a busy street. But a closer look draws in the viewer to see specific people. The setting includes items that suggest a feast for the senses--horses, wagon wheels, a cigar, a baby, fresh vegetables, and more.