Teachers Karen McKay and Caroline Allison first posted these ideas as part of the Emerging America Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources Training of Trainers program.
Date: Aug 29 2012
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Formed in 2009, the Literacy Design Collaborative (LDC) recently released a thorough, well-researched process for developing middle and high school units that fully address Common Core English Language Arts (ELA) standards at a very specific level.
Only one of 13 sample modules (on the Cold War) stands out for its exemplary discussion of primary sources. It is well worth a look. (Even t…
Date: Aug 22 2012
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The Vol. 1, No. 2, Fall 2012, TPS Journal issue on the Common Core and primary sources features a lead article, "Primary Sources: At the Heart of the Common Core State Standards," by Emerging America Director, Rich Cairn. More.
Date: Aug 22 2012
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Last summer, a distressed teacher friend shared an all too common story. Throughout the school year, she had sparked students’ skills and passions with a cross-curricular exploration of slavery. It was heady, demanding, and bang-on target for both state content standards and her 4th graders’ interests in fairness, difference, and understanding where we come from. At year’s end, her principal co…
Date: Jun 23 2012
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The good news is that New York State just released sample questions that address the Common Core. Yet if this is what testing mastery of the Common Core looks like, then the standards themselves are in trouble. Let's look closely at one of the questions related to primary sources.
The sample 5th grade question below follows a passage about civil rights organizer, Cesár Chavez, accompanied by the p…
Date: May 23 2012
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Guest Post: Rusty Annis, Belchertown, Massachusetts, Teacher
Date: May 12 2012
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Fourth and fifth grade students at the Hilltown Cooperative Charter School published their research at: Colonial Voices of Williamsburg. The site lays out students' entire path of discovery, including: photos and discussions from visits to local archives, student-created traditional Colonial floor cloths, a historical timeline, and ultimately, the gravestone of Master, Jonathan Warner.
Document E…
Date: Apr 21 2012
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In Fairbury, Nebraska–pop. 5,000–where I grew up in the 1960s, there lived literally zero black people. It was not by chance: the Klan and its allies had driven blacks out of much of the rural Midwest. (My parents' Civil Rights advocacy found scant welcome in my home town. But that's another story.) When I was in 6th grade, my older, wiser brother (a 9th grader) handed me the Autobiography of M…
Date: Mar 28 2012
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Guest Post: Rusty Annis, Belchertown, Massachusetts, Teacher
World War II marked a watershed for American identity, equality and opportunity. Advocates called bastions of racism into question and for the first time effectively challenged many aspects of discrimination. The war gave minorities (including women) a chance to contribute in a noticeable way to American society. It was not an easy tran…
Date: Mar 19 2012
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Since before the American Revolution, it has been common knowledge in Western Massachusetts that there lies a tension between the wealthy centers of farming and trade along the Connecticut River and the steep, rocky, and isolated "Hilltowns." Yet these small towns, like communities everywhere, have sometimes played outsized roles at key turning points of our nation's history.
Over the winter of 2…