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 also emphasizing enduring understandings and reinforcing cross-discipline connections. Learning with primary sources helps students … [Read more...]
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 secondary primary source activity, a teacher spotlight highlighting primary source learning in the … [Read more...]
Learning from the Source: Minutemen & the Start of the Revolution
Activity Guidelines Gather minutemen-related primary sources and print them out or make them available to your primary students digitally. As a class or in groups, have students review different primary sources and note what they see, think, and wonder. Next, you may choose to have students review source bibliographic information or secondary source materials and note if any of their questions were answered, how their thinking has changed, and what new questions they have. Then … [Read more...]