Top of page
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: Cheryl Lederle
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.
Posted in: Interviews with Experts, Teaching Strategies
Posted by: Cheryl Lederle
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.
Posted in: Teaching Strategies
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: Stephen Wesson
I love getting to see the students in Teresa St. Angelo's kindergarten classroom engage with the films and photographs and carefully identify evidence, of course. But the photos and stories in this post are also a valuable reminder that primary sources are powerful teaching tools at any grade level.
Posted in: Teaching Strategies, Young Learners
Posted by: Stephen Wesson
Common Core State Standards and many other standards require that students compare informational texts in different media. However, multimedia texts aren’t limited to the 21st century. In fact, one of the most compelling multimedia campaigns in U.S. history was launched more than one hundred years ago, using paper, glue, and an effective set of persuasive techniques.
Posted in: Development of the Industrial United States (1877-1914), Lesson Ideas, Teaching Strategies
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