Journey Back In Time Teaching Suggestions
Description: History comes alive for students whose learning experiences are enhanced with primary sources. With the current national focus on improving the teaching of American history at all levels, primary sources provide educators with the content needed to meet emerging national and state standards calling for their use. Current textbooks and their ancillaries seldom meet more than half of these standards. Through primary sources students come to know our great founding principles, how our institutions came into being, how they work, and what our rights and responsibilities are. Primary sources from Journey Back in Time provide the authentic resources needed to improve the teaching of American history at all levels.
Teaching Suggestions:
Suggestions for introducing a unit of study / motivating students
Select one or two primary source articles from journeybackintime.com and copy to an overhead or project through a LCD projector to begin a lesson, chapter, or unit of instruction. Select articles that:
O challenge conventional thinking or a stereotype,
O present facts vs. opinions
O present a contradiction or difference of opinion,
O present a puzzle,
O picture artifacts
O provide some insight,
O involve human interest and empathy,
O provide a generalization or explanation for comparison in a later lesson.
Suggestions for applying concepts / extending beyond the textbook
Use an existing Scavenger Hunt from the website or build your own. As homework, ask students to find primary sources at journeybackintime.com that correspond to what is being studied in class. This assignment can be narrowed to primary sources that:
O demonstrate cause and effect,
O provide eyewitness accounts vs. secondary hearsay,
O present a chronology of events (Ask students to consider how new articles
support or challenge the information or beliefs presented by older articles),
O defend or refute conclusions in a textbook,
O expand or alter textbook explanations of history.
Suggestions for using an inquiry approach with primary sources:
Student inquiry can range from using primary sources to supplement their textbooks to working with just primary source documents.
O Introduce students to an example set of primary source newspaper articles and documents from journeybackintime.com on a topic, concept, or time
period. Assign students to assemble sets of primary sources for themselves.
O Have students use primary source sets to answer questions about historical eras, generate and test hypotheses, and derive conclusions.
Suggestions for assessment activities:
Scavenger Hunts from the website can be used for assessment or assessment activities can be selected from sources found at journeybackintime.com in the historical era under study. Following are a variety of actual assessment tasks:
O Students search for and select primary source articles to create a museum display about a historical topic. Students may add their own captions and rationale for the selected documents.
O From the contents of the primary source newspapers on the website, students may prepare a visual display such as a poster, magazine cover, or illustrated timeline that highlights the most important points to be gained from the study of primary sources.
O Students prepare and present an oral report taking a stand on an issue from history.
O Students explain how a primary source supports or challenges a commonly accepted conclusion about a time in history in a written report.
O Taking the position of someone who lived at the time a primary source was created, students write a response to a news article, editorial, or speech.
