If  you are looking to use primary sources in the classroom to help your students meet Common Core Standards, look no further than the education page of the Library of Congress (LOC).  As the largest library in the world, their online site is a valuable resource for teachers wanting to incorporate these documents into their classrooms. Along with the millions of documents (158,007,115 to be exact), many of which have been scanned for the public to view, the LOC offers a plethora of support documents such as lesson plans, classroom materials and curated sets of primary sources. With so many documents available, the difficulty could be finding just what you need that relates to your instructional topic. That’s why the Library of Congress has made such an effort to create teacher specific content and has built an entire program dedicated to Teaching with Primary Sources.

To begin, I suggest starting at the education homepage. Here you can get a glimpse at the resources available for students by subject and for teachers by type of resource. Let’s take a look at what some of those resources are and where you can locate them.

Teacher Resources

From the main page you can search for teacher resources by Common Core Standard or by your state’s standards. The LOC has categorized each resource into a standard. You’ll notice a lot of other content on this page that may be beneficial to review. The Blog, for example, can notify readers of new content added and season specific lessons and activities. For example, the blog post, December in History incorporating ELA and Science content as well as Social Studies. Visit the link for Classroom Materials on the the left to view the rest of the teacher materials that are available.

Primary Source Sets

LOC has created curated sets of Primary Source Sets that relate to frequently taught topics. Each set contains a teacher guide and a link to the LOC Analysis Tools. Students can use these tools to guide their analysis of primary sources into three categories; Observe, Reflect and Question. Depending on the type of document being analyzed, the tool provides questions to help students complete each category. Under some of the primary source sets, you will notice a link to a free e-book for students. You’ll notice under some of the primary source sets  a link to a free e-book for students. These are books students can download and view on their mobile devices that contain a set of related primary sources. They are able to easily manipulate and annotate the documents.

Lesson Plans

Search nearly 100 teacher created Lesson Plans by Era, Topic or view them all A-Z.  Each lesson plan contains a detailed procedure linked to the specific artifacts used in the lesson. The lessons are comprehensive, linking to the Common Core Standards addressed and often include multiple extension activities.

There you have just a sampling of what’s available on the site. There is so much more to check out like the Presentations and Activities where you and your students can explore themes or specific topics through interactive experiences, or Themed Resources where you can view all of the aforementioned content based on popular themes. Make sure to check out our Online PD Sessions through Teq as well where you can hear suggestions to incorporate Library of Congress resources in your classroom.