Cultural Crossroads

Cultural Crossroads: Primary Source Exercises for the Middle School and High School Classroom consists of thirty-two primary-source-based classroom exercises. Each exercise consists of an original (primary) source, a set of questions that guide students to an understanding of the source, and an extended exercise in which students apply the lessons of the source in a larger context. Questions are designed to move students from lower-level (facts and dates) to higher-level (analysis and synthesis) thinking. Each of the thirty-two lessons requires writing as part of the exercise. All exercises are based on the Colorado Model Content Standards in History and Language Arts. Some also pertain to standards in Geography and Civics. Although the majority of the exercises utilize local primary sources, Cultural Crossroads provides a set of teacher-created, ready-made, primary-source-based exercises in United States history for use in classrooms across the nation.