Consider your students' needs and interests and any logistical factors for using the item, such as legibility or copyright status. Select one or more primary sources that support the learning objectives and are accessible to students.Successful student interactions with primary sources require careful primary source selections and lesson planning. Interacting with primary sources engages students in asking questions, evaluating information, making inferences, and developing reasoned explanations and interpretations of events and issues. In analyzing primary sources, students move from concrete observations and facts to questioning and making inferences about the materials. Primary sources expose students to multiple perspectives on significant issues of the past and present. Helping students analyze primary sources can also prompt curiosity and improve critical thinking and analysis skills. They are different from secondary sources, accounts that retell, analyze, or interpret events, usually at a distance of time or place.īringing young people into close contact with these unique, often profoundly personal, documents and objects can give them a sense of what it was like to be alive during a long-past era.

Primary sources are the raw materials of history - original documents and objects that were created at the time under study.

Another word for previous event