Teaching Now: Separating Myths from History

Teaching Now: Separating Myths from History

This unit plan and teaching guide was developed by Dr. John Bickford, Professor of Social Studies/History Education at Eastern Illinois University and Editor-in-Chief of The Councilor: A Journal of the Social Studies, in collaboration with Citizen U. It presents a lesson plan with teaching notes targeted to early and upper elementary students. TEACHER BACKGROUND Children—and…

Primary Source Learning: The Wampanoag, the Plimoth Colonists & the First Thanksgiving

Primary Source Learning: The Wampanoag, the Plimoth Colonists & the First Thanksgiving

This primary source set is targeted to elementary students and includes background information and thinking prompts. It was curated mainly by Dr. John Bickford, Professor of Social Studies/History Education at Eastern Illinois University and Editor-in-Chief of The Councilor: A Journal of the Social Studies, with the goal of helping students separate Thanksgiving myths from history. This…

Citizen U Webinar: The “Four Freedoms” & the Bill of Rights

Citizen U Webinar: The “Four Freedoms” & the Bill of Rights

Citizen U lessons infuse civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions across the core subjects in elementary, middle, and high school grades. This interactive webinar will feature practice with interdisciplinary civics, inquiry-based learning, and teaching with primary sources. You’ll see how these free lessons can be used in either ELA or social studies classes and how they’re differentiated across…

Citizen U Webinar: Should the Government Ever Censor the Press?

Citizen U Webinar: Should the Government Ever Censor the Press?

Citizen U lessons infuse civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions across the core subjects in elementary, middle, and high school grades. This interactive webinar featured practice with interdisciplinary civics, inquiry-based learning, and teaching with primary sources, and provided information about free middle and high school lessons that can be used in either ELA or social studies classes….

Citizen U Webinar: Teaching About Journalists & a Free Press

Citizen U Webinar: Teaching About Journalists & a Free Press

Citizen U lessons infuse civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions across the core subjects in elementary, middle, and high school grades. This interactive webinar featured practice with interdisciplinary civics, inquiry-based learning, and teaching with primary sources, and provided information about a free elementary-level lesson that can be used in either ELA or social studies classes. View webinar recording Lesson…

Teaching Now: Predicting & Inferring with Primary Sources & Literature

Teaching Now: Predicting & Inferring with Primary Sources & Literature

This is a guest post from elementary teacher and adjunct university instructor Kimberly Heckart, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. “I developed the Predict and Infer strategy to help students develop historical comprehension skills while comparing, contrasting, and evaluating information from primary sources related to a particular time period. This strategy motivates students to predict the relevance…

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…

Finding Resources: TPS Journal

Finding Resources: TPS Journal

Dig deep into a variety of teaching with primary sources topics. The TPS Journal, formerly titled the TPS Quarterly, is an online, peer-reviewed publication focused on pedagogical approaches to teaching with Library of Congress digitized primary sources in K-12 classrooms. Each issue provides sections related to the issue’s thematic focus: a feature article, an elementary primary source activity, a…

Selecting, Excerpting  & Modifying Primary Sources

Selecting, Excerpting & Modifying Primary Sources

Have you ever wanted to use a primary source document with students but hesitated because you felt the struggle to comprehend the text would be the focus of the task rather than text analysis? In a TweetChat about teaching with primary sources, middle school social studies teacher Chris Heffernan (@cheffernan75) articulated the dilemma, “This has been a…

Guided Primary Source Analysis: Astor Theatre – The Great Ziegfeld

Guided Primary Source Analysis: Astor Theatre – The Great Ziegfeld

Where do you think this photograph was taken? Zoom into the photo and describe this place using details from the image to inform your description. (Save the link in the previous sentence to download the image to your computer which will allow you to zoom in with greater detail.) Next, make a guess at what decade this photo is…

Guided Primary Source Analysis: What Do You Hear?

Guided Primary Source Analysis: What Do You Hear?

Listen carefully to this audio recording. You will hear six different sounds. What do you hear? Where do you think this audio recording was made? Why do you think that? What questions do you have about this audio recording? Now listen to the full audio recording, then find out who made this primary source audio recording (be sure…