While my true love is literature, I also have a soft spot for history, which explains why I seem to gravitate towards primary sources. I especially love when primary sources help tell a story, or provide background information to make a story I’m reading come alive for me. Books like Port Chicago 50, Lincoln’s Grave Robbers, and even Popular are my dream come true! As I was writing those book reviews, I came across the gem that I will share with you in today’s post because the nerd in me just can’t contain my excitement!
Did you know the Library of Congress has a collection of FREE iBooks????? 
They call them Student Discovery Sets and they are amazing. Find them on the Library of Congress website or you can find them in the iBook store as well. Each book offers collections of primary sources organized around a theme or time period. There are nine books right now, but they seem to be slowly adding more. At the moment, a lot of the topics seem to lend themselves to the higher grade levels, but elementary teachers could easily pull pieces of the books into their lessons.
The purpose is open-ended primary source analysis. Each primary source is a high-resolution image (some of the books include sound recordings too) and students can tap the image to reveal some interactive tools. A drawing tool lets students annotate with a few different colors, and the analyze tool lets them add their own reflections in a text box. If students get stuck with their analysis, they can click “Show Prompts” for some great questions to help them observe, reflect, question and investigate. The librarian in me is happy to see that a detailed citations page has been included at the end as well.
Each iBook has teacher resources to guide classroom use. There is typically a PDF teacher’s guide that includes historical background for each source, suggestions for introduction and sequence of study, as well as additional resources. The Library of Congress also has a page of analysis tools and graphic organizers you can use with your students that is linked from the teacher resource page. You can find all the teacher resources here: http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/primarysourcesets. This page also contains even more primary source sets that don’t have iBooks, but are all curated and ready for use with students!
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