Why Use Primary Sources?

If you are wondering why you should take a look at using primary sources in your classroom read what Library of Congress has to say:

• Primary sources expose students to multiple perspectives on great issues of the past and present.
• Interpretations of the past are furiously debated among historians, policy makers, politicians, and ordinary citizens. By working with primary sources, students can become involved in these debates.
• Primary sources help students develop knowledge, skills, and analytical abilities.
• By dealing directly with primary sources, students engage in asking questions, thinking critically, making intelligent inferences, and developing reasoned explanations and interpretations of events and issues in the past and present.
• Primary resources help students begin to understand that all history is local and helps them accept empathy for the human condition.
• Hopefully students will begin to understand the continuum of historyby studying with primary source materials.

Can you think of other reasons, it all boils down to giving kids the opportunity to think.