K-5 Teachers, this one's for you.

Instead of one long post, I'm going to send out three more targeted posts this week, so ignore the ones that don't apply to you. But for elementary teachers looking for online resources, read on--including you K-3 teachers.

Teaching Montana History is typically light on materials to help teach our youngest students, but here are a few:

Kid Citizen promotes itself as "a new way for young students (K-5) to engage with history through primary sources. ... In KidCitizen’s interactive episodes, children explore civics and government concepts by investigating primary source photographs from the Library of Congress. They also connect what they find with their daily lives." Episodes include a nice introduction to primary sources and episodes on topics like child labor, community helpers and the American flag. I haven't watched them all, but I did see episodes that were clearly designed for early elementary.

I've mentioned them before, but I love Songs from the Indian Reading Series so much I think they are worth mentioning again. These videos have Mariah Gladstone and Rob Quist performing songs based on stories available from the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory's Indian Reading Series (140 culturally relevant stories written and illustrated by Indian authors and illustrators.) Rob Quist sings and plays the guitar and Mariah Gladstone translates the lyrics into Indian Sign Language.

Upper elementary teachers may be interested in the National Archives' series of twenty-minute mini-webinars on using DocsTeach. You can participate in person Wednesdays at noon Montana time or watch past webinars on YouTube.

Do you ask your students to analyze primary source images? If so, check out this Upper Elementary Image Analysis Choice Board.

Do You Want to Be a Cowboy/Girl? is a new lesson I've excerpted from Unit 3 of our new fourth grade curriculum because I thought it could be easily adapted to distance learning. It was scheduled for classroom testing this spring along with the rest of the unit but life got in the way. I'm optimistic that it will be useful, however, in our current situation, so I went ahead and posted it.

Second grade teacher April Wills of Bainville, who is also a Teacher Leader in Montana history, discovered that Newsela has gathered all Montana-related articles under the heading "My State, My Community: Montana." If you don't know Newsela, you are in for a treat. The site takes written sources (including news articles and historical documents) and rewrites them at a variety of Lexile levels. Their toolkits provide information on using the site for distance learning.

And now a plea: The quality of Teaching Montana History depends on your input. If you have not yet shared your favorite Montana history lesson, how you've adapted MHS resources to distance learning, or expressed your opinion on what topics we should focus on next year, please click here to take our survey. Everyone's favorite posts are the ones where I share what's worked in classrooms across the state, but I can't do that unless you tell me what's worked in your classroom.

Need a little incentive? I’m adding another prize for the fifty-second person to complete the survey. Will it be you?