Access the four drafts and the final version of Langston Hughes’s poem “Ballad of Booker T.” from the Library of Congress. For ideas on helping students to follow the poet’s creative process, check out the Teaching with the Library of Congress blog’s teaching ideas for using the marked-up drafts and final copy of Hughes’ poem “Ballad of Booker T.”…
Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection is an online presentation of a multi-format ethnographic field collection documenting the everyday life of residents of Farm Security Administration (FSA) migrant work camps in central California in 1940 and 1941. Todd and Sonkin, both of the City College of New York, traveled to Arvin, Bakersfield, El Rio, Firebaugh, Porterville,…
The Teaching with the Library of Congress blog gives some great tips on using the WPA Poster collection with students. One idea is to have students identify persuasion techniques. For a great resource on typical advertising persuasion techniques, check out Print Advertising Across the Centuries project. One teacher used this project as a template and created a…
Understanding historical context is an important element when considering why a primary source was created. The Teaching with the Library of Congress blog outlines characteristics to look for when selecting primary sources that students will be able to place in historical context. For more help providing historical context, look in the Library Teacher Guides in…
The Collection Connections section of America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets, provides some great ideas for comparing perspectives of the Civil War based on the lyrics from popular song sheets published during the time period. The popularity of song sheets reached its peak during the second half of the nineteenth century and a large portion of this…
The Library of Congress has compiled individual primary source sets for every state in the country (as well as a set related to U.S. territories) and this week the Teaching with the Library of Congress blog provides teaching ideas for using this rich set of resources. Be sure to check out the primary source collections below as well….
The Teaching with the Library of Congress blog gives some great tips on selecting the most effective primary sources to use with your students. The TPS-Barat program offers some more tips, suggesting teachers ask themselves the following questions when choosing primary sources for use in the classroom. Goal – What is the overall activity or project goal?…
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…
The Teaching with the Library of Congress blog highlighted the Radium Dance song sheet cover and gave some great science-related teaching ideas for using the Chronicling America historical newspaper collection to make historical connections to the Curie discovery of radium and early popular uses for this chemical element. Another idea would be to have students…