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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: Cheryl Lederle
On November 19, 1863, renowned orator Edward Everett spoke at the dedication of a memorial cemetery. The world has little noted nor long remembered what he said in those two hours. Everett’s oration was upstaged by the next speaker’s concise 272 words, now familiar as Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The following day, Everett himself sent Lincoln a note, complimenting him, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”
Posted in: Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877)
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: 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: Cheryl Lederle
Common Core State Standards, and many state content standards, emphasize reading informational text. Explore primary sources from the Library of Congress to discover informational text in many formats--including some formats that might surprise you.
Posted in: Teaching Tools
Posted by: Cheryl Lederle
Women filled a variety of roles in the Civil War. In addition to women who served as spies, daughters of regiments, cooks, laundresses, and nurses, approximately 400 posed as male soldiers. So, who were these hundreds of women soldiers? Why did they join? And how did they manage to do it?
Posted in: Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877), Veterans and Military History, Women's History
Posted by: Stephen Wesson
Primary sources can provide a window into the Great Migration, the largest internal migration in the history of the United States.
Posted in: African American History, Development of the Industrial United States (1877-1914), Industrial United States, World Wars and the Great Depression (1914-1945)
Posted by: Stephen Wesson
Informational text is more important to teachers than ever before, especially with the rise of the Common Core standards. The Library of Congress is an excellent resource for finding and using texts to build students' reading skills.
Posted in: 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