Teachers Program

Introduction

If you are new to the Library of Congress, the best place to start is the Teachers Program. Browsing through the outstanding selection of classroom materials made by teachers for teachers will orient you to the endless possibilities of digital primary sources and how to use them. You will find ready-to-use lesson plans, interactive presentations, themed resources, and primary source sets curated by the Education Outreach Department at the largest library in the world. You will also find primary source analysis tools which will be explained in Lesson 7.

loc.gov for Teachers - This film focuses on the resources for teachers available from the Library of Congress web site. (4:36) Transcript

Lesson Plans

You can find lesson plans on the Library of Congress Teachers Page that meet Common Core standards, state content standards, and the standards of national organizations. You can also search the lesson plan collection by topic and era. A favorite lesson plan from the Library of Congress is Mark Twain's Hannibal that compares Mark Twain's description of Hannibal, Missouri in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to a Panoramic Map of the town from the same time period. By analyzing and comparing this literary text and historic map, students will discover how close Huckleberry's world was to reality.

Bird's eye view of the city of Hannibal, Marion Co., Missouri 1869. Retrieved from the Library of Congress

Interactive Presentations and Activities

The Library of Congress Education Outreach staff has developed numerous online interactive presentations and activities that engage students with primary sources and help bring history alive in your classroom. It's No Laughing Matter introduces the persuasive techniques of political cartoons and helps students recognize bias in today's media. Cartoons in this Presentation are large and suitable for classroom projection and large group analysis.

The cartoon on the right is part of the Miller NAWSA Suffrage Scrapbooks, 1897-1911 collection at the Library of Congress. The Teachers Page includes this cartoon in the American Memory Timeline presentation, posing the question, Do you think it was designed to promote the cause of women's suffrage, or not? What messages about women does the cartoon contain? What would you infer about the cartoonist's attitudes about women's suffrage?

(1909) Woman's Sphere: Suffrage cartoons. , 1909. [?] [Photograph] Retrieved from the Library of Congress

Primary Source Sets and Student Discovery Sets

One of the most popular resources on the Teachers Page is the list of Primary Source Sets. Each set includes a Teacher's Guide with historical context, teaching suggestions, links to online resources, and printable pdf images for related primary sources. These packets are classroom ready. The Found Poetry primary source set begins with an analysis of a source document for historic understanding and then the retelling of the same story in poetic form.

Student Discovery Sets are i-books that put digital primary sources right onto iPads so students can zoom in, draw on, and conduct open-ended primary source analysis. Full teaching resources are available for each set.

Student Discovery Sets Free on iBooks Index

READ ABOUT IT

Read this blog post from the Library of Congress, What makes a primary source a primary source?

What is a primary source?

The Library of Congress Teachers Page defines a primary source as " the raw materials of history — original documents and objects which were created at the time under study. They are different from secondary sources, accounts or interpretations of events created by someone without firsthand experience."

Tom Bober, 2015-16 Library of Congress Teacher in Residence, defines a primary source as "a document or artifact that is from the time period and is directly tied to the topic under study."

In the article listed above, What makes a primary source a primary source?, Cheryl Lederle points out that one source may be secondary when used for one purpose or study and become a primary source for a different topic of study. Most of us produce a variety of primary sources daily. These sources become the evidence of our lives that may someday be interpreted by future historians studying our culture and our time period.

Write About It (in the Canvas Discussions Tutorial 1)

1. Browse the classroom materials on the Teachers Page and select one resource that aligns with your interest, local curriculum, or standards.
2. List the title and URL of the primary source you selected.
3. Explain why you selected this resource and how you would use it in a classroom or in a professional development workshop.

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