Explore primary sources to learn about daily life in Colonial Massachusetts.

Students will practice with posing questions about primary source documents and then analyzing the resources to learn more about life in Colonial Massachusetts. Students will summarize their learning in the final lesson.

What was everyday life like for people who lived near the ocean in Massachusetts 250 years ago?

What can a newspaper tell us about the lives of men, women, and children in 1767 Massachusetts?

Focus skills include:

Explore the First Amendment free speech rights
of students...through analysis of Supreme Court decisions.

Students will practice summarizing interpretations of Freedoms of Speech under
the First Amendment.

Explore primary sources connected to the Civil Rights movement.

The English Learner Collaborations project of the Massachusetts Council for the Social Studies commissioned the development of lessons to illustrate applying English Language Development (ELD) teacher resources to History and Social Studies content.

By the end of the sequence of lessons linked below, students should be able to explain the principles of non-violent civil disobedience, and will be able to provide examples of non-violent civil disobedience.

On this page, we feature resources for teachers of History, Social Studies, and Civics who are designing curriculum in the context of the pandemic, both for students who may be learning from home, and for students navigating a changing environment no matter where teaching and learning happens. 

Among these resources are many that provide guidance for increasing the accessibility of digital teaching resources.

This lesson has a sharable ready-made album of primary sources with an introduction essay by the author!

“I Can’t Even Get To The Back of the Bus” – Disability, 504 and the Power of Protest

This lesson investigates why and how people take action to make a difference. Building from an inquiry-based RAN chart, the lesson explores the context of the 1977 protests calling on the Federal Government to actually implement 504 access legislation. Featuring a variety of primary sources, including testimony of activist Ed Roberts.   

Wendy Harris, a teacher at Metro Deaf School in St.

Rubrics are frequently used to communicate expectations and standards to students. Making expectations as clear, simple, and easily understood as possible is a practice of value to all learners.

A streamlined rubric form, using one column to specify the target standard, offers advantages for accessibility–especially fewer words to absorb–over more typical multi-column rubrics. This Single-Point Mastery Rubric is an example. 

Disability History: From Almshouses to Civil Rights

UPDATED IN 2020. The following primary source set, created using materials from the Library of Congress, contains an array of sources focused on Disability History in the United States. Disability has been interwoven into America’s history since the country’s inception through letters, images, newspapers, diaries and other primary sources. The set provides a comprehensive look into a wide range of Library of Congress resources.