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

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.

Monica Edinger has been an elementary and middle school educator for more than twenty-five years and currently teaches fourth grade at the Dalton School in New York City. An inveterate learner, she was a 1997 American Memory Fellow at the Library of Congress and has received three National Endowment for the Humanities fellowships to study children’s literature. Monica has been an active participant on the Child_lit Internet discussion group as well as other online communities for many years. She presents regularly at national conferences and is the author of two other books and numerous articles.