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Looking for ways to engage your students while building their critical thinking skills? These tips and resources can help you hit the ground running with primary source analysis.

Finding Primary Sources

The Library’s online collections include millions of freely accessible primary sources — prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, newspapers, and more. To help you efficiently sift through these collections and find primary sources to use with your students, check out these shortcuts available on the Finding Primary Sources page:

• Primary Source Sets –  primary sources on frequently-taught K-12 topics, along with historical background and teaching ideas;
• Free to Use and Reuse Sets – visually-rich primary sources on a variety of engaging topics;
• U.S. History Primary Source Timeline –  featuring primary sources from key periods in U.S. history.

Using one of these curated resources can help you save time as you begin searching for primary sources. If you’d like to look beyond these shortcuts, the Finding Primary Sources page lists additional resources and tips for searching the Library’s collections.

Foundations of Primary Source Analysis

Teachers often tell us that it helps to use hands-on, inquiry-based teaching strategies in which learners are encouraged to slow down, observe primary sources, draw inferences based on these observations, and formulate related questions. Explore the following resources to learn more about some of the foundational strategies:

• Analyzing Primary Sources self-paced interactive module – watch a sample primary source analysis, then practice the strategy by analyzing a historical photograph yourself. A certificate for 1 hour of professional development is available upon completion.
• Analyzing Primary Sources recorded webinar – follow along as teachers practice three primary source analysis strategies – from a 30-second bell-ringer to a more in-depth analysis. Webinar session materials are also available.

Some Fun Starters

The Teaching with the Library blog includes many suggestions for using primary sources with your students, including recommended primary sources and specific teaching strategies. Here are three that might be fun to start with:

• Hide and Seek on Mulberry Street – turn primary source analysis into a game that encourages close observation and description skills.
• The Question Game – use game cards with primary sources to help students practice questioning skills.
• Can You Believe Your Eyes? – can your students determine which image is real and which is fake by closely observing a source?

This is just a small sampling of what the blog has to offer, so we invite you to explore further.

Let us know in the comments what works with your students!