Teacher resources and professional development across the curriculum
Teacher professional development and classroom resources across the curriculum
Reflect on how you teach the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition and technological development of the late 19th century in your classroom. How would you teach it differently with primary sources?
Now consider these lesson ideas contributed by Primary Sources teachers:
This lesson focuses on the following questions:
For this lesson, I split my students into five to six groups. Each group read two to four essays from the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The groups then recreated each author's worldview in an oral summary to the class. As a whole class, we identified the common denominators among the predictions and assessed to what extent they came true.
Finally, each group came up with 10 predictions for America in the year 2100. They listed their predictions on newsprint, and we compared and contrasted them with the primary sources. Many students were surprised to find a number of similarities.
The lesson worked extremely well, and the students' response was tremendous. It was truly the nature of the documents that drove the lesson and heightened student interest.