Chapter 5: Centering History Instruction Around Primary Sources

The student responses above are examples of the ways in which-fifth grade students navigated and attempted to make sense of images as primary and secondary source materials. In this lesson, students were asked to engage with a variety of primary and secondary source materials in order to better understand the history of three civilizations, separately and together, and the work of historians. Throughout the lesson, students explored different materials at centers designed to support activities ranging from defining and identifying primary and secondary source materials to making hypothesis about a map and synthesizing understandings based on several sources about the same topic. Students documented the work at each center in a single handout ( Appendix A), the source of the responses in the vignette above.