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.

Jen Hoyer is electronic resources and technical services librarian at CUNY City College of Technology.

Kaitlin H. Holt is the associate director of Interpretation and Programs at the Central Park Conservancy.

Julia Pelaez is an educator at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Center for Brooklyn History.

historical institution.

Brooklyn Public Library (BPL) was established in 1896 and is one of the nation’s largest public library systems with more than 850,000 active cardholders.