KidCitizen is part of the Congress, Civic Participation, and Primary Sources Project, which is supported by a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program. KidCitizen is a digital interactive for K-5 learners that promotes historical inquiry, civic engagement and literacy through the investigation of primary sources from the Library of Congress and making connections to their daily lives. To learn more about the design and pedagogy of the digital interactive, don't … [Read more...]
Citizen U Webinar: The “Four Freedoms” & the Bill of Rights
December 4, 2018 by Leave a Comment
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 grade spans from elementary to high school. You’ll also be eligible to enter a drawing for a $50 … [Read more...]
Citizen U Webinar: Teaching About Journalists & a Free Press
October 8, 2018 by Leave a Comment
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 Plans Elementary: Journalists and a Free Press Middle … [Read more...]
Citizen U Webinar: Teaching About Dolores Huerta & the United Farm Workers
September 10, 2018 by Leave a Comment
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 information about three ELA-Civics lessons about Dolores Huerta and the United Farm Workers. The lessons reach across grade levels to elementary, middle and high school students. View webinar recording. Related … [Read more...]
Citizen U: Lessons Infusing Civics Across the Curriculum
January 28, 2018 by Leave a Comment
The Citizen U curriculum is a collaboration between the Barat Education Foundation (BEF), Constitutional Rights Foundation (CRF), and DePaul University’s Office of Innovative Professional Learning (DePaul OIPL) and was developed thanks to a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) program. The goal of the Citizen U curriculum is to infuse civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions across the core subjects in elementary, middle, and high school grades. Working with … [Read more...]
Teaching Now: Predicting & Inferring with Primary Sources & Literature
May 26, 2015 by Leave a Comment
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 and meanings of sources and then discover information that will help them make sense of the sources while … [Read more...]
Analyzing Primary Sources: Elementary Image & Text Analysis Sheets
May 21, 2015 by 1 Comment
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 of Iowa. Kim whose accolades include Elementary Social Studies Teacher of the Year for both … [Read more...]
Finding Resources: TPS Journal
May 6, 2015 by Leave a Comment
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 secondary primary source activity, a teacher spotlight highlighting primary source learning in the … [Read more...]
Guided Primary Source Analysis: Astor Theatre – The Great Ziegfeld
March 23, 2015 by Leave a Comment
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 from and describe what you think life was like at this time. Review the bibliographic record for this primary source. Then do some research and find out what this … [Read more...]
Guided Primary Source Analysis: What Do You Hear?
March 17, 2015 by Leave a Comment
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 to scroll down to read the notes). Were you surprised by what you heard and learned? Why or why not? What further questions do you have about this audio … [Read more...]
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