DocsTeach has been one of my go-to resources for U.S. History lessons for many years. DocsTeach offers more than 1,500 primary source activities to use in elementary, middle, and high school history lessons. Additionally, DocsTeach provides tools for creating your own online lessons using primary sources from the National Archives of the United States.
This week DocsTeach published fifteen new activities across three themes in U.S. History. Those themes are Industrialization, Immigration, & Progressive Reforms, World War II and Holocaust Refugees, and The Revolution, New Nation, & Expansion. Within these themes there are new primary source-based lessons for elementary, middle, and high school students.
- This new lesson on comparing rural and urban life in the early 1900s is a good one for elementary school students who are just beginning to learn what primary sources are and how historians use them.
- This new lesson on analyzing a letter written by Jackie Robinson is designed for high school students to go beyond just analyzing text by thinking about the larger historical context of Robinson’s life.
- This new lesson on political cartoon analysis is intended to get middle school students thinking about some of the causes of the American Revolution.
You can learn more about how to use DocsTeach by watching this video overview that I recorded last year.