What Primary Sources Teach: Lessons for Every Classroom

Build confidence in delivering primary source-based instruction with easily adaptable, skill-based lessons that can be used in a variety of learning environments. Each lesson offers suggestions for differentiating instruction with diverse audiences, worksheets, and activity templates.

What Primary Sources Teach provides practical and transferable lesson plans focused on skill-based instruction, including step-by-step instructions; ideas for differentiation; corresponding teaching tools, such as worksheets and activity templates; and suggestions for assessment. This book includes resources that are intuitive to classroom teachers and easily adoptable by librarians and informal educators tasked with translating their current primary source-based instruction to a K-12 environment.

This book celebrates the role of primary source education and provides a wide range of educators with a shared language for articulating the relevance of teaching with primary sources. The reader will build confidence delivering primary source-based instruction as they work their way through the lesson plans, tools, and resources offered in this book. Eventually, they will feel comfortable designing lesson plans of their own for primary source-based instruction.

Skill-based adaptable lesson plans rooted in use of primary sources

A chapter that helps instructors adapt lesson plans to meet the needs of diverse learners and classroom types

Lessons include Common Core State Standards and Guidelines for Teaching With Primary Sources (SAA-ACRL/RBMS 2018) alignment as a resource for articulating the benefits of primary source-based instruction to K-12 instructional leads and administrators