Students investigate a local community event to practice thinking like historians by sourcing, corroborating, and contextualizing newspaper clippings, yearbook pages, and oral history excerpts from the public library. Over five class periods, they use a short slide deck, team discussions, and hands-on source routines to answer the question of what local history reveals about the people, places, and traditions they see today. Their work culminates in a two-sided evidence poster with a source collage, timeline, and CER-style reflection that shows how they built a claim from multiple sources and revised it through peer and partner feedback.

Students will analyze primary and secondary sources about a local community event, compare how the sources relate, and use sourcing, corroboration, and contextualization to build a stronger understanding of the past. They will conduct a short research investigation by generating questions, gathering evidence from newspapers, yearbooks, and oral history excerpts, and organizing findings into a timeline and source collage. Students will collaborate in discussions, use slide-based source-analysis routines and vocabulary to develop a CER-style historical claim, and communicate their conclusions through a poster, reflection statement, and studio walk presentation with multimedia and visual evidence.

Students will create quick daily thinking artifacts, including corroboration claims from the Mystery Source Mixer, source-analysis notes from printed local newspaper clippings, yearbook pages, and oral history excerpts, and exit-ticket sticky notes for the reflection wall. The main product is a two-sided source-collage poster about a local community event that includes curated evidence, a simple timeline, and a CER-style reflection statement explaining how corroboration and context revealed change over time. Students will also use a short slide deck and printed source sets to build guided historical thinking routines into their work before presenting their poster in the Historic Huddle Walk. After peer, guest, and library-partner feedback during the studio walk, students will revise and submit a final poster version.

Open with a Mystery Source Mixer using print sets from the public library: newspaper clippings, yearbook pages, photos, and short oral-history interview excerpts about the same local event. In teams, students sort the sources, match which ones belong together, and post a quick corroboration claim on a reflection wall answering what happened and how they know. Use a short slide deck to introduce sourcing, corroboration, and contextualization with a few guided questions, then have students compare a primary and secondary source on the same event. Close with an exit ticket sticky note connecting the event to a place, tradition, or community change they still notice today.

Host a Historic Huddle Walk in the classroom where students display their two-sided evidence posters and stand by them to explain how their source collage, timeline, and CER conclusion show community change over time. Invite classmates, another 7th grade class, and the public library partner to rotate through the studio walk and leave sticky-note feedback focused on corroboration, context, and clarity of evidence. Add a short presentation round in which each student shares one primary source, one secondary source, and how comparing them changed their thinking. After the walk, give students brief revision time to update their posters before submitting the final version.