With place-based learning, students use inquiry to study the built and natural environments that surround them while they also explore local culture, history, or people. As they build connections with a place, students understand how places are connected to each other and how they can connect to them as learners. Using primary sources to make…
Citizen U has developed a series of 8 micro-credentials (MCs) in a partnership with the National Education Association (NEA) and thanks to the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources TPS program grant. This professional learning offering aims to help educators better integrate inquiry learning with primary sources into instruction across grades and disciplines using…
Southern Illinois University Edwardsville collaborated with several Teaching with Primary Sources (TPS) Consortium partners including Emerging America, Mars Hill University, and the TPS Midwest Region to offer a “just in time” online professional development course titled Teaching with Primary Sources in the Elementary Classroom. This online asynchronous course integrates classroom footage of teachers and librarians…
Developed in partnership with middle school social studies teachers, Read.Inquire.Write. (RIW) supports students in inquiry and argument writing in social studies. All resources are free, thanks to a grant from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program, but access to specific materials requires a free teacher account. As students progress through investigations in…
First draft vs final drafts This is a guest post from Alyssa Park, a fourth-grade teacher at Scarselli Elementary School in Nevada. Nevada map QFT lesson plan Alyssa’s Twitter thread showing student work from this lesson Related resources
The Right Question Institute (RQI) is an educational nonprofit that aims to make democracy work better by teaching a strategy that allows all people to learn to ask better questions and participate more effectively in decisions that affect them. RQI’s education program offers online courses and free resources on the Question Formulation Technique (QFT), a…
Maryland Humanities, a Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Program Consortium member, partnered with Maryland Public Television and the Maryland State Department of Education to create the Thinkport Inquiry Kits— primary source sets designed to prepare students to analyze primary sources and conduct primary source research. The kits may also be used by teachers…
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…
The Library of Congress has long realized that teaching with primary sources engages students and promotes critical thinking skills and helps them to construct knowledge. With a shift from a primary focus on content knowledge to the process of interacting with and comprehending, analyzing, and evaluating content, we can help forge deeper content knowledge while…
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…
During the civil war Walt Whitman worked in Washington D.C. and spent much of his spare time visiting wounded soldiers in the hospital. He was a great admirer of Abraham Lincoln whom he saw around the city frequently. Like many, Whitman was deeply saddened at the loss of President Lincoln, assassinated at Ford’s Theatre on…
Image sequencing activities help students better understand written or spoken texts. Image sequencing requires groups of students to review an image set and match individual images with designated lines of text, discussing and justifying their choices. These activities give students great practice in the skills emphasized by the Common Core State Standards, particularly the CCSS standards…