The National Archives Learning Curve

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• Learn more about Britain, critical literacy, Europe, higher-order thinking, inquiry, and world history.

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The National Archives of the United Kingdom has created amazing resources on British history for this site. Primary sources are prominently featured in the lesson plans, online exhibitions, and other activities that address topics such as crime and punishment in the Middle Ages, the Tudors, the royal family throughout history, the British empire, Victorian Britain, WWI, WWII, the cold war, and political cartoons. The site makes use of images, film, audio, and flash technology to create engaging presentations of its information. For a sample of the resources available, look at their Tudors and Cold War exhibitions.

The creators of this site realize the importance of teaching students how to work with primary materials, and they have put a great deal of effort into making sure students not only have access to primary sources, but that they also receive clear instruction on how to usefully analyze those sources. This instruction is usually embedded in the content of the exhibitions, but there are also instances where the entire exhibition is focused on teaching a skill. Such exhibitions are located in the section Focus On (history skills), which includes using a census, analyzing historic film, learning how to read a primary document, and learning how to analyze politcal cartoons. Students are expected to learn these skills based upon North Carolina’s language arts and history curricula, and these skills will also help students think critically about various sources of information on a daily basis. The skill presentations are appropriate for high school students, although they could also be used in middle school.