Teaching with Primary Sources

My goal is to teach a fifth-grade class in the future. Students at that age are learning to analyze documents and data, which works perfectly with primary sources. I want to inspire students to want to learn. I can do this by providing interactive learning. I am still in the works on incorporating primary sources into my teaching. My plan is to use the Library of Congress website to gather my sources. Primary sources cultivate wonder, curiosity, and inquiry-based learning in a variety of ways. By looking at primary sources such as maps, journal entries, and historical documents, students can catch a glimpse of how life was back in the time they are learning about. Looking at these sources can raise questions as well that the students may have. Primary sources foster historical thinking because they provide students with a direct source of information about what they are learning about. Students are seeing firsthand the documents that are from history, rather than a secondary source. Primary sources bring about multiple perspectives on a topic due to the fact that it is directly from history. Students are able to see the perspectives of people who wrote journal entries, diaries, or took photos from a specific time period. Primary sources give a direct perspective to the historical figures back then. I see great value in incorporating primary sources into my teaching. I find it very important for students to not only learn about history, but to also see it for themselves. By bringing primary sources into a lesson, the students are given a glimpse of the past that they were not present for. Primary sources are the closest pieces of information we have to the real events that went on. Incorporating primary sources also helps students with analyzing information and making inferences. I will apply primary sources in the future by providing students with diary entries, photos, journal entries, and more. As long as the source correlates to the topic being learned, then it will definitely be implemented. A gallery walk with primary sources would be a great way to engage students and have them moving around the classroom.




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