Writing in Historical and Cultural Contexts

Browsing through the excellent Technology in Class site, I ran across a quick mention of Anneberg Media’s very nice Interactives page.

The Anneberg folks have created a wide variety of online hands-on, brains-on activities in five content areas: language arts, math, science, art and social studies. Of course, I was interested in their social studies offerings. There are four activities for middle and high school kids in both US and world history.

But I was especially interested in working through one of the language arts choices called Historical and Cultural Contexts. The idea is help kids learn to recognize and interpret primary sources  accurately with a focus on writing:

Become a document detective! Use your sleuthing skills to figure out when and where an historical event took place by examining some primary sources and using an educated guess to pinpoint them on a map and timeline. Then, test your document expertise and analytical skills by answering questions about them.

Some nice stuff. This would be perfect for high school and middle school kids. Be sure to set aside time afterwards for discussion and de-briefing.