Sorting Primary and Secondary Sources

Practice the two sorting questions on a few classroom items before the Civil War sort. For the letter and the two accounts, read aloud once and have students underline the words that show the writer's purpose or side.

Sort 12 Civil War sources, from a soldier's letter to a 2015 textbook, as primary or secondary. The directions on the page read: Read the text. Circle the letter of the best answer to question 1. Write your answer to question 2 on the lines. An answer key is included.

Yes, both. We made it for 6th Grade Sources, Data and Research Skills, and the page works the same whether it lands on a kitchen table or a center rotation. At home, most families go through it together and talk the answers out loud, and that talking is where most of the learning happens with primary and secondary sources. In class it runs well as independent work while you pull a small group. Print one copy or thirty, whichever the day needs.

The page lists letters, diaries, photographs, speeches, maps and newspapers from the time of an event. The Civil War sort includes a letter a Union soldier wrote home in 1862 and a nurse's diary kept during the war.

It depends on the topic. The sheet explains that a documentary made in 1990 is a secondary source about the Civil War but a primary source about how people in 1990 saw the war.

People describe an event differently depending on where they stood and whose side they were on. On the sheet, the colonists blame the soldiers and the British government, while the soldiers, speaking at their trials, blame the mob. Students then find the facts both accounts share.