I’m always looking for primary documents to use in class.  Documents that are already in electronic form are the best - it saves me the time of typing or copying and editing the documents.

The Virginia Center for Digital History has a small collection of primary documents that are suitable for secondary social studies classrooms.  The goal of the website is “helping secondary school teachers … find primary resources on the web, related to their curriculum.”

It looks like the project is still under construction, but there are plenty of resources available right now.  The documents cover ten different time periods - from Exploration and Colonization to the Contemporary United States.  Most of these topics include ten to fifteen different documents for you to use.

One topic is “Expansion and Reform: 1801-1860.”  This contains a few sub topics, including describing “issues that divided the nation.”  On this sub topic, there are four documents available - “Memoir of a Lowell Mill Girl,” “Memoir of a Slave Girl,” “Abolitionism” and “The Seneca Falls Declaration.”  These all provide some insight into the troubling issues of the nation’s early history.

Aside from providing the documents (or links to documents hosted on other university websites), the website also provides ideas for lessons.  Each document contains one or two ideas for a Do Now related to the document and its topic.  It also contains two or three ideas for activities to do involving the document.

The number of documents is limited, but this website is a great resource.  I’ll keep it bookmarked and probably use at least one or two of the documents and lesson ideas in my classroom this year.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 19th, 2007 at 6:35 pm and is filed under Resources, Internet, Education. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.