History is not the dusty past, it is living in our memory and interpretation every day. Help history come alive for your students by immersing them in experiences that will help them develop empathy, curiosity, and critical thinking skills! Primary sources, video clips, and simulations are three of my favorite ways to engage my students to make deep connections with people across time and space.
Primary Sources
Real objects and documents created by real people help break students out of textbook drudgery. The Library of Congress is a treasure trove of rich social studies resources, and it’s not limited to U.S. History. Their Classroom Materials page is a great starting point containing primary source sets, lesson plans, and presentations. The Free to Use and Reuse Sets are just a small sample of items that the Library believes are in the public domain and can be used in any number of ways. Ready to dive in deep? The Digital Collections are great to find primary sources for any content area you can think of!
Other museum websites around the world offer access to at least part of their collections online, often with experiences that can help make the past more real to students. From AI reconstructions of what Egyptian mummies looked like as living humans to an interactive timeline of the 9/11 attacks, museums have rich social studies resources for educators of any content!
Video Clips
“Show, don’t tell” is a technique authors and filmmakers use to heighten drama and draw us into their stories. Use this technique to your advantage with curated video clips from YouTube and other sources. Lean into students’ short attention spans by showing focused clips of YouTube videos related to your content, and then give them an activity to process what they just saw.
You can easily insert a video clip into any Google Slides presentation and use the Video Playback feature under Format Options to edit it down to just the clip you want to focus on. A simple turn and talk around a question related to that short clip gives students the time they NEED to process what they’ve just seen, and they will feel more connected to the material, and each other, if they have an opportunity to process with each other, or to review the material with a focus. You can also turn any video into an EdPuzzle, or a quiz in your LMS of choice, or a resource to consult when answering written questions.
Simulations
Experiential situations that draw students into real experiences of people and events in history bring the content alive! A simulation can be a play, a game, a mock trial, elections, a roleplay, or a reenactment.
According to Hasan Jeffries, host of the Teaching Hard History podcast, a simulation is “an attempt to recreate a situation or phenomenon from the past to put students in a recreated environment as much as possible.” The theory behind this type of activity is to “allow students to assume the roles of other people and act out scenarios in order to gain deeper insight into historical events.”
You can find simulation activities for your content with a simple internet search. Go to Teachers Pay Teachers and search for free simulations! Do you teach U.S. History? Try Mission US. Teaching World History? The OER Project has many simulations to choose from. Teaching U.S. Government? Try the many role-playing games on iCivics!
Try one or more of these social studies resources today to help history come alive for your students!
Alexis Gross is an 8th grade European History teacher in Fort Worth, Texas. She has taught Social Studies for 21 years with a focus on literacy, language acquisition, and critical thinking.
