Fact Pyramid

My school has been working hard to switch to the common core standards for the past year or so. For social studies we really need to focus on primary source documents and non-fiction reading. I am lucky that my textbook includes a lot of primary source documents, but I am always looking for more to use in my classroom. Sometimes it can be difficult to know how to analyze these documents and really stress the importance.  This week one of my favorite blogs, History Tech, posted something that I can see is extremely useful for primary source and non-fiction reading sources. It's called "Fact Pyramid, Because Box" and asks students to evaluate, analyze, and rank 4 pieces within the document in the form of a pyramid. Then students are required to use the "because box" to back up their opinion. I am super excited to use this next year. If you are interested as well, check out this post:
Fact Pyramid, Because Box