Adapting+Primary+Sources

Adapting Primary Sources

media type="custom" key="7306027"

[|Adapting Documents for the Classroom: Equity and Access]

[|Supporting English Language Learner]

Visit the [|Historical Thinking Matters] webpage to f ind answers to the question "What happened at the Battle of Lexington in 1775?" This interactive website reveals that historical evidence is often fragmented and contradictory. Since this is all that historians have to go on, see how the strategies historians use - sourcing, contextualizing, close reading, and corroborating, are used to try to help interpret the primary sources.

Wordle - can be used as an anticipatory set to introduce the primary source. For example, you can use the text from the Declaration of Independence to get students thinking about the historical document. This web-based program creates “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. In the example, below the text was copied and pasted from a transcript of the Declaration of Independence. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends.

media type="custom" key="7438919" align="center"