Classroom connection: primary-source power!

I think that teaching with primary sources goes a long way toward supporting the "Danger of a Single Story" throughline that pops up so often throughou the year.

I am looking forward to trying the closed campus Sourcing Introduction activity in a couple of weeks. I am a big believer in rolling out new skills with a non-history example! I actually steered clear of this one because it was quite a hot topic when our school moved to a closed campus, but I am hoping that the dust has settled enough to have a good conversation around source analysis now 

Thanks for a great Teaching Clinic!  I appreciated learning new strategies, like color-coded highlighting for different parts of the HAPP-Y acronym, and really appreciated the suggestions for using AI Tools to help make the excerpts more accessible to students who may be having difficulty with the reading level and length.  Looks like I need to start learning how to use AI...

Thank you all so much for coming to our primary sources session. Here are the inoculation sources we chatted about.

George Washington's letter on inoculating the troops: 

The Mount Vernon site has the letter scanned, which would be cool to show students and it also has a transcript tab: https://www.mountvernon.org/education/primary-source-collections/primary-source-collections/article/smallpox-inoculation-letter 

The National Archives also has it on their site: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Washington/03-08-02-0281 

Then, the Adams' letters are here: https://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/archive/doc?id=L17760713aa 

And also on the National Archives site: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-01-02-0023 

Looking forward to reading all your sourcing tips!

Anne Koschmider - Can you explain what a "closed campus" is?  It sounds like there is quite a bit of variation on teachers' freedoms regarding what to teach and how to teach it depending on where one lives.  I think folks had some great responses when they talked about the sources "talking for themselves."

Carrie Emmerson I just meant closed campus as it applies to lunch policy - our students used to be able to drive or walk to local restaurants for lunch, but now they have to stay at school and eat in the cafeteria (similar to the scenario in the sourcing intro activity).

Got it - Thanks

I really appreciated the workshop as well, just to brush up on how to approach sourcing, since it's still one that my students struggle with.  They mostly have the rudimentary skills around it, and I want to try to level up their analysis.  The Quick Sourcing Tools is where they are at. 

I'm going to try the highlighting soon - that is something I haven't done yet. What are your best strategies to scaffold up their Sourcing Analysis?  Is it just practice? Do you use other strategies besides HAPP-Y?