Lesson Plans
The following lesson plans enable you to engage students with primary sources related to the Western Expansion of the United States in the 19th century.
These lessons all follow the Spiral Question Format. Spiral questions guide students from lower- to higher-level critical thinking skills so that they become comfortable and adept at analyzing primary sources. There are three levels to spiral questions: description, interpretation, and analysis.
- in creating your own Spiral Questions for primary sources.Filespiral_questions_rev_09-21-11.pdf132.04 KB
The teacher-created lessons below include instructions, primary sources, and Spiral Question worksheets, among other materials, you can use in your classroom immediately.