Sources

Lesson Overview

Teaching the research process requires locating sources of information. Accessing and integrating primary sources into lessons can engage and hook learners into the topic or theme. The purpose of this module is to build a collection of quality resources and focus on best practices for inclusion of these materials for a variety of learners.

As you view:

Note that bold underlined words are hyperlinks. Click and explore the sites and tools.
Keep in mind how you might use these resources in your teaching situation.

Why Use Primary Sources?

Primary sources provide a window into the past—unfiltered access to the record of artistic, social, scientific and political thought and achievement produced by people who lived during that period. Three reasons to use primary sources when teaching:

Engage students
Develop critical thinking skills
Construct knowledge

Resources for best practices in using primary sources:

Think Like a Historian

The Reading Like a Historian curriculum engages students in historical inquiry. Each lesson revolves around a central historical question and features a set of primary documents designed for groups of students with a range of reading skills.Instead of memorizing historical facts, students evaluate the trustworthiness of multiple perspectives on historical issues and learn to make historical claims backed by documentary evidence. List of Reading Like a Historian Lessons

Links to Primary Sources

The Avalon Project

Thousands of historical documents organzied by century. A specific collection, Ancient, Medieval and Renaissance Documents, provides one location for documents related to the development of government and laws. In general, documents from the 18th century on tend to be U.S. History based.

Primary Source Collections

Rewordify.com allows your students to paste in the text of hard to read documents and receive a simplified version. This free tool offers settings that fit your readers' needs to improve comprehension of historical documents.

Smithsonian Learning Lab

Empowers student curation of Smithsonian resourses to share a topic or theme to communicate learning.