Archives: August, 2007

Through primary source documents and images, the Green ‘N’ Growing collection from North Carolina State University Libraries explores the history of home demonstration and 4-H youth development in North Carolina from the 1900s to the 1970s. In these corresponding lesson plans your students peek into the lives of girls and women during the 1930s, explore the effects of civil action during World War II, build an understanding of the needs of animals, and much more. Revisit this link over the next couple of weeks because more of these engaging lessons are on the way.

Last winter we released our version of the North Carolina Collection’s Tobacco Bag Stringing: Life and Labor in the Depression, which presents images and text from a report documenting the importance of tobacco bag stringing work in North Carolina during the Great Depression. To help teachers make use of these fascinating (not to mention interdisciplinary) materials, we’ve just published a series of elementary and secondary activities to accompany this project. Students will learn what tobacco bag stringing is, study primary source materials, and practice critical thinking and analysis skills.

We’ve just published a Spanish-English picture dictionary for teachers of English language learners. It is designed especially for teachers who find unexpectedly that they are teaching students who have recently emigrated from Latin America and speak little or no English. For each term, a clear photograph or illustration is captioned in both Spanish and English, and the terms are organized around classroom needs — objects in the classroom, verbs for teaching and learning, places in the school, parts of the body, and so on.

Developed by J. D. Alexander, a graduate student at UNC-Chapel Hill, the dictionary is available for now in PDF format. We hope to build a web-based version and corresponding print edition over the coming year. If you have comments or suggestions as we plan the new edition, please let us know. And please let us know especially if you use this dictionary with your students; your (and their) feedback is crucial to our development process!

You can download the PDF from our multimedia library.

If you haven’t paid very close attention to our multimedia library this summer, you won’t have kept up with how fast it’s grown. (How could you, though? I am supposed to be in charge of this website, and I can’t keep up with it either.) Since May, we’ve added:

• More than 500 photographs from around the world, with historical and cultural context — including 200+ of Ecuador, 150+ of Bali, and 200+ of Nepal
• More than 50 photographs of Depression-era North Carolina from N.C. State University’s “Green ‘N’ Growing” collection
• Several early maps of North Carolina, from the 1500s to 1900
• Several excerpts of oral history interviews on topics such as civil rights and Hurricane Floyd, with accompanying lesson plans

Soon, we’ll have 200 photos of Mexico with historical and cultural context, as well, and we are gearing up to add several hundred photographs of North Carolina.

Welcome to LEARN NC’s new news, information, and updates blog! There is now more happening at LEARN NC than we can tell you about in a single monthly email, and so to keep teachers informed we’ll post updates here, as they happen.

You’ll find:

• New online courses and other professional development opportunities
• Freshly published resources for teachers and students
• Information about LEARN NC programs
• Upcoming events, including conference presentations and LEARN NC workshops
• Updates on resources and programs in development
• Fabulous stuff we found on the web and don’t know where else to put
• Announcements of professional development opportunities from selected partner organizations

Finally, this blog is a chance for you to talk to us — to tell us what you think about our programs and resources, make suggestions, and ask for help.

You can subscribe to the blog via the RSS link in the banner. (Not familiar with RSS? That squarish orange icon with the white broadcast lines always means an RSS feed, which sends updates directly to your browser or other “feed reader.” Read our RSS primer for more information.)