This post is by Lora Taylor, a 2025-2026 Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the Library of Congress.
A recent classroom experience reminded me how naturally curious young learners are when given the chance to investigate, question, and make sense of evidence for themselves.
I taught a lesson to several groups of third graders investigating how scientists and explorers shared discoveries before cameras and modern transportation made it easy to observe and document the world. To launch the lesson, I shared an illustration of an elephant from the 14th-century.
Rather than telling students what they were looking at, I simply asked, “What do you notice?” As students shared their observations and wonderings, I recorded their thinking directly on and around the image. I circled unusual features, wrote down descriptive words, and added arrows and question marks to highlight details that sparked curiosity.
After modeling this process, I gave students two additional illustrations, one of a rhinoceros from the 16th-century and one of a crocodile from the 13th-century, to analyze independently or with a partner. As I moved around the room, I heard students asking questions, making claims using visual evidence, debating what certain features represented, and building on one another’s observations.
Next, students analyzed side-by-side comparisons of the historical illustrations and modern photographs of the animals they were intended to represent. Students immediately noticed similarities and differences, identifying details the artists had captured accurately as well as features that were clearly incorrect. This led to the central question of the lesson: Why did the artists draw these animals this way if that is not what they look like?
After some discussion, students began offering explanations. Several had already commented that the illustrations looked old, which led them to wonder whether the artists had ever seen the animals themselves. Their reasoning opened the door to a conversation about how difficult it would have been to learn about distant animals, plants, and places before photography, modern transportation, and modern communication. We discussed how many medieval artists relied on travelers’ stories, folklore, myths, and secondhand accounts rather than direct observation.
To help students experience that challenge for themselves, I asked them to imagine they were illustrators in the 1800s and that John James Audubon had just returned from a field study with written descriptions of several songbirds. Their job was to create illustrations based only on those descriptions. Students quickly discovered how much interpretation was required without a visual reference.
After students completed their drawings, I revealed Audubon’s illustrations. Students compared their work to his and used close observation to determine which bird each description represented. The room buzzed with conversation as students defended their choices, noticed details they had overlooked, and reflected on how their own assumptions had influenced their illustrations.
This lesson was a reminder that meaningful and joyful learning often begins with curiosity. Primary sources are especially effective at fostering that curiosity because they rarely provide immediate answers. They invite students to observe closely, ask questions, apply prior knowledge, and revise their thinking as they encounter new information. Throughout this lesson, my role was not to provide answers but to create the conditions for students to think like historians, scientists, and artists. By allowing students to wrestle with authentic historical sources without offering explanations, the lesson challenged them to be active investigators. Their curiosity drove the learning, and the primary sources provided the spark.
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