Literature Links: Ruth and the Green Book

Literature Links: Ruth and the Green Book

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…

Timely Connections: Fake News & Civic Reasoning

Timely Connections: Fake News & Civic Reasoning

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…

Literature Links: Her Right Foot

Literature Links: Her Right Foot

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…

Integrating Tech: Zoom-in to Primary Source Analysis

Integrating Tech: Zoom-in to Primary Source Analysis

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…

Analyzing Primary Sources: Identifying Bias in Presidential Election Newspaper Coverage

Analyzing Primary Sources: Identifying Bias in Presidential Election Newspaper Coverage

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…

Tech Tool: Creating a Google Form for Primary Source Analysis

Tech Tool: Creating a Google Form for Primary Source Analysis

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…

Integrating Tech: Primary Source Analysis using Google Forms

Integrating Tech: Primary Source Analysis using Google Forms

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…

Tech Tool: Primary Source Analysis & Annotation with ThingLink

Tech Tool: Primary Source Analysis & Annotation with ThingLink

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…

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…