This choice board is targeted to students in grades 3-5. They may use images found in the home; in newspapers, magazines or books; on television (if there is a pause feature); or online to complete the activities and may write or record (audio or video) their responses. If students have online access, below are several…
In a TPS Network resource album available to the public, elementary teacher librarian and former teacher in residence at the Library of Congress, Tom Bober (@CaptainLibrary), outlines how his students analyzed an historical newspaper article using the See Think Wonder strategy that layered in the Post-it® app for iPad to help organize students’ thinking. The…
The 3D Pyramid created by Historica Canada helps students analyze primary sources in 5 steps. The 5Ws Context Exploring Reaching Conclusions Finding Proof Find out more about the five steps by visiting the 3D Pyramid tool page. Download the 3D Pyramid to use in your classroom. Thanks @ChristinaGanev for surfacing this great tool!
Elementary teacher librarian and former teacher in residence at the Library of Congress, Tom Bober (@CaptainLibrary), details a plan for pairing primary source analysis with the book, Ruth and the Green Book by Calvin Alexander Ramsey, to help students make connections to history and geography. In his post on Knowledge Quest from the American Association of School Librarians, Tom also…
Practicing primary source analysis helps students develop historical thinking skills that also happen to be very important civic literacy skills. In an article from the Fall 2017 issue of American Educator, Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) provides assessments of online civic reasoning and tips for going beyond identifying news as “fake” or “real” to understanding where…
Tom Bober (@CaptainLibrary), teacher librarian extraordinaire and former teacher in residence at the Library of Congress, put together a fantastic primary source set to accompany the picture book, Her Right Foot, by Dave Eggers. In a post on Knowledge Quest from the American Association of School Librarians, Tom details a plan for pairing primary source analysis with the…
This is a guest post from Patti Winch, the Middle School Social Studies Specialist for Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) in Virginia. I first learned about Zoom-ins about 10 years ago when taking a class with Northern Virginia’s Teaching with Primary Sources program or TPSNVA. Zoom-ins were originally developed by a FCPS teacher and subsequently shared…
In a Teaching with the Library of Congress blog post, Deborah Thomas, program manager for the National Digital Newspaper Program at the Library of Congress, discusses Helping Students Read Between the Lines: Identifying Bias and Attitude in Newspapers for the Presidential Election of 1912. With three major candidates, rather than the traditional two, the 1912…
This is a guest post from Kelly Grotrian, an American History teacher at East Brunswick High School in East Brunswick, New Jersey. Google Forms is a great tool to use for student primary source analysis because it provides a single point of access for multiple sources and efficiently collates student responses into a spreadsheet which…
This is a guest post from Kelly Grotrian, an American History teacher at East Brunswick High School in East Brunswick, New Jersey. Far and away my favorite Google App for Education is Google Forms. Forms allows you to present a variety of primary sources to students in an organized fashion and to collect data on…
ThingLink is an online tool that allows you to layer images and videos with text, web links, and other media files. Most digitized primary sources from the Library of Congress, including most text documents, are saved as image files so ThingLink is a great tool for analyzing and annotating primary sources directly on the sources…
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…