Seeking History: Teaching with Primary Sources in Grades 4-6

by Monica Edinger

Primary sources are real stuff and real stuff is powerful stuff. Civil War photographs. E.B. White's drafts for "Charlotte's Web." An heirloom quilt. Birth certificates. All evoke actual past times and events. And no matter how well written, no textbook can provide the same sense of being there, of the realness that primary sources provide. They help us as nothing else does to begin to understand the past.

"Seeking History" is one of the first books about using primary sources in elementary and middle school classrooms to enhance and deepen students' grapplings with history. You'll read about students working as scholars as they tussle with old language and spelling in a three-hundred-year-old journal . . . compare their own photographs of a local street with others taken in 1904 and 1975 . . . view an early film to see what it can tell them about early twentieth-century immigrants . . . examine household objects to determine what life was like long ago. And they do even more, taking what they've discovered to create interpretations of their own. These students use primary sources as historians, literary scholars, artists, writers, and more. Primary sources enrich every facet of their learning.

Best of all, Monica Edinger offers lots of ideas and resources you can put to immediate use: types of primary sources; tips on finding and preparing primary sources for student use; personal, local, and remote history activities; detailed descriptions of immigration, Constitution, and Africa projects; guidelines for using primary sources to teach literature, writing, and art; and teaching strategies for interpreting text, images, and objects. A companion CD, packaged with the book, offers even more support with links to websites, reproducible handouts, and sample student work.

176 pages, Paperback

First published September 15, 2000

About the author

A familiar presence in the world of children's literature and the author of several books for educators, Monica contributes to a variety of publications including the New York Times Book Review and the Horn Book Magazine in addition to blogging at educating alice . She has helped select the winners of several awards including the Newbery and originated and co-ran School Library Journal's Battle of the Kids' Books. A committed educator, Monica began her teaching career as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Sierra Leone and currently teaches fourth grade at the Dalton School in New York City. Africa is My Home: A Child on the Amistad is her first book for children.