Welcome Back to the Classroom and to Teaching with the Library

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Welcome back to the start of a new school year! Teaching with the Library is here to support your efforts for teaching and learning with primary sources. This post highlights recent resources from the Library and suggestions for how you might incorporate them into your teaching practice.

The American Revolution Primary Source Set supports American 250 celebrations or teaching about the Revolutionary period. The set features a range of sources and source types, including maps, historical newspapers, manuscripts, drawings, and rough drafts of founding documents.

Recent blog posts from the Library also highlight aspects of America’s founding, including these two posts related to the role of the press during the Revolutionary War:

• How News of the Declaration of Independence First Spread | Teaching with the Library
• Patriots, Loyalists, and Turncoats: Newspaper Printers During the Revolutionary War | Headlines & Heroes

The most recently launched primary source set is on Newspaper Journalism. Sets from last school year include:

• Progressive Era Reforms (read more about the set here)
• Paleontology, Past and Present (read more about the set here)
• Community: People and Places (read more about the set here)

To support teachers in using these sets, blog posts offer ideas for digging a bit deeper with students on a theme, topic, or item featured in the set.

Progressive Era related posts:

• Progressive Era Conservation Debates: Multiple Perspectives, Multiple Arguments
• A Lesson in Progressive Reform: Food Safety
• The National Women’s Trade Union League: Analyzing Emblems and Handbooks from the Progressive Era

Paleontology related posts:

• Paleontologists Make Mistakes, Too! Using a Newspaper Article to Learn About the Nature of Science,
• Learning About Extinction, Evolution, and the Nature of Science through the Case of a ‘Living Fossil’
• Stacking Primary Sources to Dig Deeper into Fossilization

Community related posts:

• Community Helpers, Leaders, and Primary Sources
• Young People as Community Members, Helpers and Leaders
• Teaching About Community and Place with Library of Congress Maps

If you are looking for more general ideas about how to use primary sources in the classroom, take a look at this recent post that gives tips for finding and strategies for using items from the Library.

Finally, if you are a teacher in the DC area, or if you are planning a trip to DC this school year, you might check out the Library’s new interactive learning space for students: The Source. It’s a great space for students to develop their own connection to the Library and its vast collections.

We look forward to sharing more lesson ideas, program offerings, primary source strategies, and resources for your classroom this school year. If you have questions or suggestions about how to use primary sources in the classroom, we’d love to hear from you! Please share your thoughts in the comments.