Integrating Tech: Using Skitch & Evernote to Analyze Images

Integrating Tech: Using Skitch & Evernote to Analyze Images

This is a guest post from Kerry Gallagher, a Technology Integration Specialist at St. John’s Prep, a 1:1 iPad school serving grades 6-12, and former middle and high school history teacher. We learn about the lives of our friends partly through the images they share with us on social media platforms like Instagram, Snapchat, and…

Literature Links: Predicting & Inferring About Woman Suffrage

Literature Links: Predicting & Inferring About Woman Suffrage

This lesson uses the Predict and Infer strategy; both the lesson and the strategy were created by elementary teacher and adjunct university instructor Kimberly Heckart, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Focus Question What did women do to get the right to vote? Content Goal Students build background knowledge of what it was like to be a suffragist and discover how women persistently fought…

Analyzing Primary Sources: Elementary Image & Text Analysis Sheets

Analyzing Primary Sources: Elementary Image & Text Analysis Sheets

Primary sources engage all students—elementary, middle and high school. Below are some worksheets to help elementary students, in particular, to analyze primary source images and texts. These worksheets were created in collaboration with master teacher Kimberly Heckart, who teaches third grade at Prairie Ridge Elementary in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and Elementary Social Studies Methods at the University…

Teaching Now: Analyzing Primary Sources for Scientific Thinking & Organization

Teaching Now: Analyzing Primary Sources for Scientific Thinking & Organization

This is a guest post from Tom Bober (a.k.a. @CaptainLibrary), an elementary librarian at RM Captain Elementary in Clayton, Missouri and frequent contributor to the TPS Teachers Network. Earlier this school year I wrote about an activity in which third grade students analyzed primary sources from the Library of Congress, specifically the notes, diagrams, and…

Analyzing Primary Sources: Shake & Source Newspaper Game

Analyzing Primary Sources: Shake & Source Newspaper Game

This is a guest post by Ruth Ferris, an elementary school librarian from Billings, Montana, and a grantee in the TPS Regional Grant Program. Ruth is sharing the Shake and Source Newspaper Game procedure, instructions, and materials under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC 4.0 license. I developed the Shake and Source  when I created the lesson “Montana’s State Flower:  A…

Teaching Now: Determining the Main Idea of a Text

Teaching Now: Determining the Main Idea of a Text

This is a guest post from Glenn Jensen, a national board certified U.S. and world history teacher at Kennedy High School in Chicago, Illinois. Glenn has developed an exercise that is a great way to begin analyzing primary source texts because it has students focus on what they know, what they can extrapolate from that knowledge,…

Teaching Now: Using the Primary Source Analysis Tool

Teaching Now: Using the Primary Source Analysis Tool

This is a guest post from Barbara Evans, a middle school language arts teacher at Holden Elementary in Chicago, Illinois. After working with TPS-Barat during the past year as part of the Chicago Public Schools Social Science Academy, I was excited to use primary sources in our literature studies. The primary source analysis tool is a great resource that I…

Teaching Now: Scaffolding Primary Source Learning

Teaching Now: Scaffolding Primary Source Learning

This is a guest post from George Mueller, a high school U.S. history and world studies teacher at Dunbar Vocational Academy in Chicago, Illinois. As part of the CPS Social Science Academy, we were tasked with developing and implementing a lesson using primary sources from the Library of Congress. The TPS-Barat Primary Source Nexus has so…

Teaching Now: Thinking Deeper with Primary Sources

Teaching Now: Thinking Deeper with Primary Sources

This is a guest post from Ruth Ferris, an elementary school librarian from Billings, Montana, and a grantee in the TPS Regional Grant Program. I originally learned about the TPS-Barat Primary Source Thinking Triangle through Martha Kohl of the Montana Historical Society. I loved it! I work with K-6 students and many of them struggle academically so I am always looking…