Teaching with Primary Sources - Elementary

When I attended the Library of Congress Summer Teacher Institute called "Teaching with Primary Sources," I immediately knew that the content was going to change the way that I teach my students.

In this workshop Tom Bober tells you how and why you should include film and audio when analyzing primary sources with students.

My trip to a Maine lighthouse served as inspiration for a library lesson this year. I especially appreciate how I could incorporate my own learning with my professional learning to the benefit of my students. My experience with this lesson showed me that the stories in our lives have a way of connecting, if we pay attention to them!

You can make history come alive through picture books. Pair them with primary sources from online digital collections and history can become more than a series of facts.

Whether students are analyzing political cartoons or tracking troop movements on a Revolutionary War era map, visually rich primary sources can play an important role throughout the inquiry process.

Tom Bober shows you how to use primary sources with elementary students. As students think critically using primary sources, they will construct knowledge, develop their understanding and interpretation of what they are seeing or reading, and have looked at it so closely that their understanding of it can go far beyond other ways that they construct knowledge in the classroom.

Primary source analysis strategies work with kindergarten as well as upper-elementary students. There are variations and adaptations to all of them, but what is similar is that they encourage elementary students to engage with historical items and documents to learn and wonder. As I've used these primary source analysis strategies with my elementary students over the years, I've learned lessons that help make their learning and my teaching more meaningful.