MSLA 2017 Conference

How can we make research more than just words on a page or a screen, and facts to be memorized? The Library of Congress has a massive collection of digitized primary sources available for teacher use, from photographs of jailed suffragettes and disenfranchised child workers to recordings of the first jazz songs ever recorded to videos of early protest marches to pamphlets discouraging the entrance of early immigrants into the country. Once upon a time, to see these incredible items, you had to travel to the Library of Congress, a feat that may not been possible for most, otherwise you were gazing at secondhand photos, reprinted content, and textbook renditions. The Library of Congress has begun the process of taking their colossal collection and digitizing them, making them available to educators and students everywhere--history is now available at your fingertips. But how can you access them? How can you make the best possible use of these sources? Join this session to see how you can access these amazing treasures to use in your library to make history come to life. You will see a lesson in action, a unit in which a fifth grade class used primary sources to build a day in the life of a young colonist in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, quite literally putting themselves in history’s shoes and experiencing what life was really like for these real people who really existed. You will learn to how to access these sources, and conduct a primary source analysis by having students observe, reflect, and question primary sources, developing connections between their own investigations and real historical events.