Wednesday, February 1, 2012

Are you ready to jump back in time?

Have you seen the Caleb's Creek Media Matters blog?  That is one place that Holly DuBois shares interesting resources as well as book activities she plans to use.

Looking at her blog one day, I came across a resource that I had not heard about before .... so I thought I would share the information with you too!

Here is a part of the blog post Jump Back in Time:

Using the America's Story section of the Library of Congress resource, you can click into the Jump Back in Time feature. (I have talked about other parts of America's Story before here and here if you are interested and missed them.) Using the Jump Back in Time feature, there are a lot of neat things you can do. Of course, the main part included links to all the major historical eras of the United States, broken down into sections from 1492 to present day. Each era link will take you to information along with many links to other stories related to the same time period. I like the way this is done because you can see history as a string of many stories that fit together rather than a bland history book paragraph listing the things that happened.

Super Sleuth game
There is also a Fact or Myth question when you are on the main page with a different question each time you visit the page. It explains why it is a fact or myth. You can also choose a date to visit to see important things from that day. It suggests using your birthday, but this could also be fun to do each day to see what happened that day. You could also do the Fact or Myth question and use both as an opener to the day or something for those last few minutes after you pack up at the end of the day. The Super Sleuth game is fun but short. Famous photos of historical people have had something added to them that doesn't fit the time period and students have to find it.

This is a great place to start with introducing a time period, giving context to an era a book might be set in, or just for the history buffs!


I can see some great Social Studies and History connections for this resource from the Library of Congress. This would probably be a good place to find some nonfiction reading material.

I encourage you to look at Caleb's Creek Media Matters ....

We enjoy highlighting posts and/or blogs in the Winston-Salem/Forsyth County School System .... if you have any to share, just let us know!

We also like to share where we learned new things, so the next time you learn something new and/or interesting, let us know and hopefully we can share it too!

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