The NY Times Learning Network has just launched a new series of lesson plans called “Text to Text.” It’s a simple approach that pairs two written texts that “speak to each other.” I think it’s a Common Core close reading strategy that could be easily replicated by teachers across the curriculum – great way to blend nonfiction with fiction and incorporate a variety of media with written text.
Each lesson includes a key question, extension activities and additional resources to expand the basic lesson. Here’s two graphic organizers to help student organize their “Text to Text” thinking. (free PFD downloads) Comparing Two or More Texts Double-Entry Chart for Close Reading
The NY TImes plans to continue the series at the Learning Network – tagged Text to Text.
To date they have created three sample lessons:
“The Scarlet Letter” and “Sexism and the Single Murderess”
Key Question: To what extent is there still a sexual double standard, and how does that double standard play out in contemporary culture?
It pairs a passage from “The Scarlet Letter” with a recent Op-Ed article that, together, invite discussion on societal attitudes toward female sexuality.
“Where Do Your Genes Come From?” and “DNA Double Take”
Key Question: How are recent advances in science changing our understanding of the genome, and how might this affect fields like forensic science or genetic counseling?
It matches a Times article with often-taught scientific, historic, cultural or literary material. This edition is about new findings in genetics.
“Edward Snowden and Daniel Ellsberg”
Key Question | Is Snowden a Hero, a Traitor or Something Else?
It pairs two Times articles that capture parallel moments in history: Daniel Ellsberg’s surrender to the police in 1971 after leaking the Pentagon Papers, and Edward Snowden’s public admission in June that he leaked classified documents about United States surveillance programs.
Image credit: 1917 Film version of ”The Scarlet Letter” – publicity still (cropped)
L. to R Stuart Holmes, Kittens Reichert & Mary Martin Date
Common Core offers an incentive for teachers to use historic documents to build literacy skills in a content area while empowering students to be the historian in the classroom. But document-based (DBQ) instruction in this context requires four key elements to be successful:
The right documents.
Knowing how to look at them.
Letting students discover their own patterns, then asking students to describe, compare and defend what they found.
Basing the task on enduring questions, the kind that students might actually want to answer.
I’ve assigned my pre-service social studies methods class the task of designing some DBQs and I assembled a list of some of my favorite sources for finding historic documents in World History. More on my assignment here.
All these sites feature good search engines and the ability to download documents for use in classroom projects. Here they are – in no particular order. Feel free to comment with links to your favorite sites. Click here for best sites for American History.
Avalon Project
The Avalon Project contains a vast collection digital documents relevant to the fields of Law, History, Economics, Politics, Diplomacy and Government. All documents are in text format and easy to copy / paste. Search by era or collection.
Medieval and Renaissance Material Culture A vast collection of source material on a diverse array of topics relating to the material culture of the Middle Ages and Renaissance – not merely things, but occupations, clothing, animals, tools, eating-utensils, children and motherhood, games and pastimes, crime and punishment… even suggestions for books which may help you learn more about such matters. (Another section of the site covers clothing and material culture of the 18th century.)
Web Gallery of Art
The Web Gallery of Art is a virtual museum and searchable database of Western (European) fine arts of the Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, Realism, and Impressionism periods (1000-1900), currently containing over 32.500 reproductions. Artist biographies, commentaries, guided tours, period music, catalogue, free postcard and mobile services are provided.
Internet History Sourcebooks Project
The Internet History Sourcebooks Project is a collection of public domain and copy-permitted historical texts presented cleanly (without advertising or excessive layout) for educational use. Includes sourcebooks on ancient, medieval and modern history as well as regional and thematic collections.
The Commons / Flickr
The goal of The Commons is to share hidden treasures from the world’s public photography archives. Includes material from museums and archives all over the world. Fully searchable by theme, keywords or tags.
Title: Weighing Cotton, Bombay
Creator: Johnson, William; Henderson, William
Date: ca. 1855-1862
World Digital Library World Digital Library provides multiple ways to search and browse content, including by place, time, topic, type of item and contributing institution. And every item can be viewed with state-of-the art zoom features in order to catch all the fine detail. To date, there are about 1,460 digital items included in the World Digital Library, in a variety of formats – books, photographs, films, sound recordings, manuscripts and maps.
KimboIn 1839, the Spanish slave ship Amistad set sail from Havana to Puerto Principe, Cuba. The ship was carrying 53 Africans who, a few months earlier, had been abducted from their homeland in present-day Sierra Leone to be sold in Cuba. Drawing by William H. Townsend Around 1839 CE – 1840 CE
The Retronaut
The Retronaut is an eclectic collection of images from around the world. Tagline “See the past like you wouldn’t believe.” Search by year, category and clusters. I guarantee you will get lost in the unusual ephemera found in this site.
Korean women going out c. 1904
“The inscription imprinted on the postcard in Japanese characters indicates an outing of ‘Pyongyang’ women. The big objects over women’s heads were used to hide their face and to protect from sunshine or rain.”
Google Cultural Institute
Google has partnered with hundreds of museums, cultural institutions, and archives to host the world’s cultural treasures online. Here you can find artworks, landmarks and world heritage sites, as well as digital exhibitions that tell the stories behind the archives of cultural institutions across the globe.
The Google Cultural Institute includes : Art Project
Google Art Project is an online platform through which the public can access high-resolution images of artworks housed in the initiative’s partner museums.The platform enables users to virtually tour partner museums’ galleries, explore physical and contextual information about artworks, and compile their own virtual collection. The “walk-through” feature of the project uses Google’s Street View technology. Users can log in with their Google Account to create their own collection. Hans Holbein the Younger’s The Ambassadors Art Project on YouTube
World Wonders Project World Wonders brings modern and ancient world heritage sites online using Street View, 3D modelling and other Google technologies. Explore historic sites including Stonehenge, the archaeological areas of Pompeii and the Great Barrier Reef as if you were there. World Wonders on YouTube
Historic Moments Explore Historic Moments, Cultural Figures, Science & Technology, and other categories to browse through photos, videos, manuscripts and documents on a wide range of topics.
Detail from an Anglo-Saxon casket from around AD 700-750
British Museum London Historic Moments
Hat tip to Peter Gallagher for lead on Google Cultural Institute
Common Core offers an incentive for teachers to use historic documents to build literacy skills in a content area while empowering students to be the historian in the classroom. But document-based (DBQ) instruction in this context requires four key elements to be successful:
The right documents.
Knowing how to look at them.
Letting students discover their own patterns, then asking students to describe, compare and defend what they found.
Basing the task on enduring questions, the kind that students might actually want to answer.
I’ve assigned my pre-service social studies methods class the task of designing some DBQs and I assembled a list of some of my favorite sources for finding historic documents in American History. More on my assignment here. All these sites feature good search engines and the ability to download documents for use in classroom projects. Here they are – in no particular order. Feel free to comment with links to your favorite sites. Click here for best sites for World History.
A Democracy of Images:
Photographs from the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Selected from the approximately 7,000 images collected since the museum’s photography program began thirty years ago, in 1983. Ranging from daguerreotype to digital, they depict the American experience and are loosely grouped around four ideas: American Characters, Spiritual Frontier, America Inhabited, and Imagination at Work.
Woman and Child
ca. 1850,
daguerreotype with applied color
Jeremiah Gurney
Digital Public Library of America (DPLA)
The Digital Public Library of America (DPLA) brings together the riches of America’s libraries, archives, and museums, and makes them freely available to the world. Search the collection by exhibition, place, date and a growing number of 2nd party plug in apps. The DPLA offers a single point of access to millions of items—photographs, manuscripts, books, sounds, moving images, and more—from libraries, archives, and museums around the United States. Users can browse and search the DPLA’s collections by timeline, map, format, and topic; save items to customized lists; and share their lists with others. Users can also explore digital exhibitions curated by the DPLA’s content partners and staff.
Fighting AmericanCreator U.S. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Created Date 04/1954 Provider: National Archives and Records Administration
The Commons / Flickr
The goal of The Commons is to share hidden treasures from the world’s public photography archives. Includes material from museums and archives all over the world. Fully searchable by theme, keywords or tags. Please help make the photographs you enjoy more discoverable by adding tags and leaving comments. Your contributions and knowledge make these photos even richer*
Have Fun with History A resource for students, educators and all lovers of American History. Loaded with historic videos. Many in the public domain. People and Events in History are categorized by century so they’re easy to find. Or to locate by history topic, choose History Subjects.
FedFlix
FedFlix features the best movies of the United States Government, from training films to history, from our national parks to the U.S. Fire Academy and the Postal Inspectors, all of these fine flix are available for reuse without any restrictions whatsoever. Browse by collection, subject or keyword.
US National Archives Docs Teach – well organized by era / theme – thousands of primary source documents to bring the past to life as classroom teaching tools from the billions preserved at the National Archives. Use the search field above to find written documents, images, maps, charts, graphs, audio and video in our ever-expanding collection that spans the course of American history.
LIFE photo archive hosted by Google
Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Organized by era, but you can also search by theme. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google Second Texas Take Out: Life Saving Tamales A view showing the Tamale industry in Brownsville Market plaza. Brownsville, TX, US 1939
Photographer: Carl Mydans
The Retronaut
The Retronaut is an eclectic collection of images from around the world. Tagline “See the past like you wouldn’t believe.” Search by year, category and clusters. I guarantee you will get lost in the unusual ephemera found in this site.
Girls Say Yes To Boys Who Say No 1968
“Joan Baez encouraged draft resistance during her concerts, and is believed to have suggested that women opposed to violence should go for men who were resisting the military draft. This suggestion soon turned into the poster featuring Baez, which was created by Larry Gates and sold to raise funds for the Draft Resistance movement. The poster features the Joan Baez, along with her sisters Pauline and Mimi.”
Library of Congress The LOC is a vast collection in a variety of formats – posters, photographs, video, audio, maps and more. You can search by collections – for example prints and photographs. Or search by a variety of themes or topics. Includes material from around the world. A good place to start is the teacher section which includes many resources and lesson plans useful teachers. You can even search by Common Core standards.
Front cover of Jackie Robinson comic book
part of a larger collection – Baseball and Jackie Robinson
Created/Published c1951. Shows head-and-shoulders portrait of Jackie Robinson in Brooklyn Dodgers cap; inset image shows Jackie Robinson covering a slide at second base
Ad Access
Ad Access is a project of the Duke University Libraries contains over 7,000 U.S. and Canadian advertisements covering five product categories – Beauty and Hygiene, Radio, Television, Transportation, and World War II propaganda – dated between 1911 and 1955. Well indexed by collection, era. See more Duke collections here
UNT Digital Library
The UNT Digital Library is home to materials from the University’s research, creative, and scholarly activities, and also showcases content from the UNT Libraries’ collections. Materials include theses, dissertations, artwork, performances, musical scores, journals, government documents, rare books, and historical posters. Search by locations, dates, types or collections
Title: Save your cans
Artist: McClelland Barclay Date: 1943
Agency: War Production Board Archive
Chronicling Americais a free, searchable database of historic U.S. newspapers. Search America’s historic newspaper pages from 1836-1922 or use the U.S. Newspaper Directory to find information about American newspapers published between 1690-present.
What One May Wear, [on Bicyles] The Herald (Los Angeles, CA), June 2, 1895
Watch this short video as Matthew Shlian talks about himself, how he learns and the role that curiosity plays in his work. Then think about the kind of classroom that would foster Matt and learners like him. Matt states:
I failed at math. I failed at Algebra. But I can understand things if I can see them. And I can actually understand them better if I can hold them in my hand. … A lot of my work is about curiosity. I come to understanding by making. If I can see what something’s going to look like when it’s finished, then I don’t want to make it. That would be like filling out a form.
If I can see what something’s going to look like when it’s finished, then I don’t want to make it. That would be like filling out a form.
As the video description notes:
Matthew Shlian works within the increasingly nebulous space between art and engineering. As a paper engineer, Shlian’s work is rooted in print media, book arts, and commercial design, though he frequently finds himself collaborating with a cadre of scientists and researchers who are just now recognizing the practical connections between paper folding and folding at microscopic and nanoscopic scales.
An MFA graduate of Cranbrook Academy, Shlian divides his time between teaching at the University of Michigan, mocking up new-fangled packaging options for billion dollar blue-chips, and creating some of the most inspiring paper art around.
Ghostly teamed up with the Ann Arbor-based photographer and videographer Jakob Skogheim, to produce this feature short, which combines interview and time-lapse footage of Shlian creating several stunning new pieces.
I’m planning for an upcoming full-day workshop for Chicago-area middle school teachers entitled “Think Like a Historian: Literacy and the Common Core.” The Common Core encourages students to more closely read a text (in all it’s multimedia formats) by answering three critical questions
What did it say?
How did it say it?
What’s it mean to me?
If you were apply those questions to my workshop you might answer them like this:
What did the workshop say? For all it’s controversies, the Common Core provides a basic road map for helping your students to “think like a historian” and enhance their literacy and critical thinking skills.
How did the workshop say it? Don’t lecture at people. Model the strategies and let teachers experience them in a classroom-like setting.
What’s it mean to me? What are the workshop’s strategies and perspectives that I could feasibly incorporate into my classroom to support Common Core skills?
Now that I’ve “flipped” the workshop, here’s a brief lesson in using Common Core questioning. I’m currently visiting Turkey and I thought I’d model a Common Core close reading of my visit to an Istanbul museum exhibit. I’ll dig a little deeper into the three questions with a few more prompts and provide brief answers as if I were a high school student reflecting on their experience.
First the setting: I visited the “Anatolian Weights and Measures” exhibit at the Pera Museum in Istanbul. It’s one large room with exhibit cases around it’s perimeter. A very manageable number of artifacts, labeled in both Turkish and English. I spent about an hour there. So here goes – Common Core close reading prompts, followed by “student responses.”Left: Roman steelyard weight – Hercules
1. What did the text (artifacts / exhibit) say? Summarize the key ideas and provide supporting details.
A: The museum exhibit is a roomful of measurement tools – weight, volume, distance. When I first walked in I turned right and looked at some tools from the 1900s. As I continued around the wall I realized that I was going back in time. Sort of an interesting way to look at the artifacts.
As I progressed “back in time” to the Egyptians era, I realized how important measurement was to civilization. I realized that if you were going to trade things, you needed to measure them. The same was true for owning land. You needed to have a way to measure it. Plus people need to have some way to agree on the “official” measurements. That means the ancients needed some sort of government or rules for trade. You can see that many of the weights had “official” seals on them.The exhibit showed that the ancient Babylonians, Egyptians, Greeks created standardized systems for measurement.
Common Core close reading prompts, followed by “student responses.”
2. How did the text (artifacts / exhibit) say it? How is it organized? Who created it and what were their goals? What patterns do you see?
A: I’ll answer this one from two perspectives – first the creators of the original artifacts and then the curators who designed the exhibit.
The weights were all designed to serve a function, but they were often very artistic as well. At first I wondered if that was because craftsmen wanted to personalize their work. Then I thought the artisans might have decorated the weights to make them harder to counterfeit. Ancients would want to be sure that weights were accurate and that some trader wasn’t ripping them off with a phony measurement. I think the weights were also designed to look official to give people confidence in the measurements they were getting.
The curators of the exhibit used a chronological approach to present the artifacts. But they also grouped items together by themes to help you make connections across time. For example there was a section featured mobile scales from different eras. They were designed for traders that needed scales that they could easily bring with them. That got me thinking of the long history of trade routes tranporting goods from far off lands.
18th C Money Changer’s Balance
3. How does it (artifacts / exhibit) mean to me? How does it connect to my life and views?
A – The exhibit is called “Anatolian Weights and Measures” and it makes it very clear that every artifact was found in that region. I think one of the goals of the curators was to prove that Turkey has had a long history of civilization and trade. The exhibit showcases thousands of years of measurement tools that reinforce the idea of Turkey as as the crossroad of different cultures. That echoes the image of modern Turkey as a gateway between Europe, Asia, and the Middle East. The exhibit also makes me realize that the idea of a global economy is actually not a new thing. People have been trading across vast distances for thousands of years.
In one way, in the exhibit reminded me of how some things never change. It seemed like there was little difference in the scales used in Egypt or the portable balance of 18th century money changer. The basic physics stayed the same. The Roman steelyard balance works using the same principals as a locker room scale with sliding weights.
But in another way, the exhibit reminded me how much the new technologies have changed things. The exhibit included a set of linked folding metal measuring rods that today are easily replaced by a small laser distance finder. They would could both measure distance, but the technology, accuracy and portability of the tools are dramatically different.
The NY Times Learning Network has just launched a new series of lesson plans called “Text to Text.” It’s a simple approach that pairs two written texts that “speak to each other.” I think it’s a Common Core close reading strategy that could be easily replicated by teachers across the curriculum – great way to blend nonfiction with fiction and incorporate a variety of media with written text.
![What One May Wear, [on Bicyles] The Herald (Los Angeles, CA), June 2, 1895](https://peterpappas.com/images/2013/09/What-One-May-Wear-on-Bicyles-The-Herald-Los-Angeles-CA-June-2-1895.jpg)
Watch this short video as 
