As beginning of the school year approaches, 4th and 7th grade history teachers will flock to The Portal to Texas History’s Resources4 Educators web site to find lesson plans for their classes. Over the years, with the help of grant funding, UNT graduate students and teachers have created more than sixty lesson plans that incorporate primary source materials from The Portal to Texas History. Along with meeting Texas’ curriculum standards, the goal when designing the lessons is to make learning fun and bring history to life by using photographs, historical maps, newspapers, letters, and artifacts from collections in the Portal.
On average the Portal’s Resources4 Educators website receives 8,000 visitors each month, 1,500 of which end up downloading the lessons to use in their classrooms. The lessons’ topics range from Cabeza de Vaca’s early exploration to the Civil Rights movement in Texas, and it’s no surprise that the two most popular lessons are the “Remember the Alamo” and “Cowboy Culture.”
–submitted by Tara Carlisle, Project Development Librarian, External Relations
