What Are the Social Sciences?
Find and share artifacts from home that represent economics, geography, civics, and history.
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Primary Source Activities
These rich Primary Sources come with questions to guide students through analysis and can be used to facilitate classroom discussions.
- Hopi Origin Story. Read an origin story and reflect on what you could learn about a group of people based on their stories.
- Sojourner Truth: One Speech, Two Versions. Read two versions of the same speech and reflect on why there might be two versions of this speech.
- Differing Viewpoints: Historical Interpretation of Christopher Columbus. Analyze several quotes to see how one event can be interpreted in many ways.
Additional Resources
See these collections for additional ideas.
Smithsonian
Run by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, this site invites students to become a historian by studying artifacts from a family in the 1700s. Students examine clues, make conclusions about the family, and compare their ideas to those of actual historians.
PBS Learning Media
Check out the six stories that explain the origins of a particular aspect of different Native American civilizations.