The Learning Page: Activities and features

In this installment of the American Memory Guide, learn to easily locate activities and features specially designed for students and your classroom.

By Melissa Thibault

(United States Weather Bureau. Provided by the National Photo Company Collection at the Library of Congress. More about the photograph)

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American Memory: North Carolina educator's guide

Each month during 2007, LEARN NC will feature an in-depth look at one aspect of the Library of Congress' American Memory with a special focus on North Carolina materials.

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Related pages

• Accessing the American Memory collection: Multimedia formats and offline-use tips: The American Memory collection contains a wide variety of formats including motion pictures, sound recordings, sheet music, maps, and photos. First, learn how to find them, then explore options for use in your classroom.
• The Learning Page: Getting started with primary sources: Introduces a primary sources guide made available through the Library of Congress's The Learning Page. You'll also get an introduction to some of the LOC's lessons that will help your students use primary source materials.
• Collection Connections: In this installment of the American Memory Guide, learn to find teaching resources associated with the Library of Congress's primary source collections.

Related topics

• Learn more about American Memory, Learning Page, Library of Congress, activities, primary sources, and web exhibits.

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Searching and browsing a collection as vast and varied as American Memory is probably more frustrating to a student than rewarding. Even teachers (and librarians — this one included!) struggle to locate the content they need for lessons or presentations. Fortunately for all of us, the Features and Activities section of the American Memory Learning Page pulls together interactive student sites and thematic web-based presentations from their various collections. It is a pleasure to explore these showcases of primary source content.

Activities

Activities offer an interactive experience and focus on a specific topic rather than broad themes. They offer an opportunity for hands-on student work and in some cases they feature games, animations, and other engaging media students will enjoy. With some direction from the teacher, the activities can be used to accomplish learning objectives in information skills, social studies, English language arts, music, art, and more.

North Carolina-specific content is not prominently featured in the activities but there are ways to tie the materials to the North Carolina classroom. For example, the Songs for Our Times activity provides an opportunity to gain historical understanding of the circumstances in local communities during the Civil War through an analysis of Johnny Comes Marching Home or to explore the world of the railway worker using Casey Jones. In addition, recipes in the Great American PotLuck activity feature foods grown and eaten in North Carolina including okra and yams. There are also recipes from a host of cultures — probably something from every country and ethnicity represented in your classroom! While this recipe collection is not as comprehensive as many others online, the recipes are shared with a story from each contributor indicating why that recipe is important to his family. Perhaps students in your class could complete a similar recipe exchange as a “getting to know you” activity.

There are a few activities that you really don’t want to miss. Taking the Mystery Out of Copyright doesn’t necessarily provide new or different information about intellectual property and fair use, but the kid-friendly characters provide a clear, succinct presentation that make this dull topic more comprehensible. The Branding of America provides a historic look at media literacy topics: brand names, trademarks, and logos. It also addresses important current issues including knock-off products and generic brands. Finally, the skill-building process inherent in It’s No Laughing Matter will help secondary students develop an essential understanding of political cartoons and teachers will appreciate the vast collection of suggested resources for using political cartoons in the classroom.

Be choosy. Some of the activities present special challenges or limited value toward accomplishing learning objectives in the classroom. In What in the World is That? students identify inventions, but the objects in the images are hard to discern and students are offered only two guesses at the right image without any feedback. I would skip the game and focus on the Learn More page or at least require students to spend time examining the contextualized photos before allowing game play. Zoom into Maps is valuable for the vocabulary and as a sampling of the kinds of historic maps in the collection but due to the large format of the materials it is very difficult to use, even for secondary students. Teachers may choose to use this activity as part of a whole-class presentation, demonstrating the various options for display, magnification, and navigation before expecting students to use online maps themselves.

Be sure to preview any activity first to verify that it will accomplish your instructional goals and that it is developmentally appropriate for your students. While many of these Activities require the Macromedia Flash plug-in to run, there are also text versions available to meet accessibility standards.

Feature presentations

Feature Presentations span the American Memory collections to investigate curricular themes. The presentations include historical background, helping to tell the story behind the theme. They even offer usage tips like suggested search terms and related resources.

The crown jewel of the Features collection is the American Memory Timeline. Select a time period on the home page of the timeline feature or page through the eras chronologically. Once you select an era you can read an overview then select a topic for that period. For each topic, you will find an overview plus relevant documents from the American Memory collection. For example, start with the Progressive Era to New Era 1900–1929, and then select the topic Immigrants in the Progressive Era. From there students can read an overview of the immigrant situation during the Progressive Era and then examine primary source materials, including oral histories from a cross-section of period immigrants as well as photos and films of immigration. This timeline is an excellent way to integrate the American Memory collections in your presentation of history without asking your students to struggle with locating relevant content in the various collection databases.

Features are rich and varied in their presentation and arrangement. Civics and history classes can discover some of the important issues during different times in the accounts of presidential inaugurations and in the coverage of Elections… the American Way. The immediacy of the stories describing the struggle for equality in Women Pioneers and in the images and oral histories of Immigration… the Changing Face of America will make history real in a way that a traditional textbook cannot.

And because it’s getting to be that time of year, don’t miss the history of Thanksgiving traditions, particularly the Thanksgiving Timeline.