During the summer of 2012, the Hoover Presidential Library held a weeklong workshop for educators emphasizing the use of primary sources with students grades 6–12. The grant was made possible through The Library of Congress Midwest Center for Teaching with Primary Sources administered by Illinois State University. Educators from across Iowa researched topics at the Hoover Presidential Library or online in the holdings of the Library of Congress. The following lesson plans were created by teachers and are presented as viewable webpages and editable Word documents so educators could modify them for use with their students.

• Life in Former Soviet States: What Are They Like Today? - Allows the students to understand current events, and we require a weekly current events assignment throughout the term. We discuss the current events and determine what factors have contributed to the current situation.
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• Everyday Life in the 1920s - This lesson serves as an introduction to primary source documents in preparation for research middle school students will do for National History Day.
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• Iowa in Revolt: Rural Violence in the Early Years of the Depression - This lesson focuses on the primary resources from 1930-33 that shed light on the justifications and the actions for the rural violence that occurred in Iowa prior to Roosevelt’s New Deal programs in Iowa. No significant acts of organized rural violence occurred after 1933.
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• Analyzing Hoover’s Response to the Great Depression: A Primary and Secondary Source Comparison - Most high school textbooks describe Hoover’s response to the Great Depression as ineffective, and most Americans associate his name with failed economic policy. Was it? Through this lesson, students will analyze primary and secondary sources to learn how Hoover responded to the Great Depression. Then, they will create their own interpretations of Hoover’s response.
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• Using Primary Documents while Teaching Huckleberry Finn - In the midst of teaching the novel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain, I find it helpful for historical context and the students’ fuller understanding to use primary documents as supplements to the novel itself. I have embedded these documents at various stages of the novel and use them for various purposes, which I will explain.
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• Speech! Speech! Comparing and Contrasting Presidential Speeches - Presidential candidates and presidents make lots of speeches. On the campaign trail a candidate will deliver her or his stump speech dozens of times, often multiple times a day. If a candidate wins his party’s nomination, he makes a formal acceptance speech on the last night of his party’s national convention. And if he’s fortunate enough to win the general election, he will make a victory speech (typically on election night) and deliver a formal inaugural address the day he’s sworn in as president. Once in office a president will make innumerable speeches to various audiences, but his most widely watched each year is usually his State of the Union address, in which he reflects on the state of the nation, outlines his administration’s accomplishments over the past year, and outlines his agenda for the year ahead. In this lesson, students will select two or more speeches by presidents or presidential candidates to compare and contrast in an essay
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• Presidential Campaigns - This lesson encourages students to research, create, and design material over the 2 presidential candidates.
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• Exploring Primary Sources - This lesson is designed to introduce students to primary sources: what they are, how to find them, how to analyze them, and why they are useful in enhancing one’s research. The lesson is designed to be used near the beginning of a National History Day, or similar research project.
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• Investigating the London Disarmament Treaty of 1930 - This Lesson uses primary documents to allow students to investigate the Naval Disarmament Treaty in 1930. Students will use primary and secondary sources and finish by writing an editorial about the Treaty.
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• Votes for Women - Although the campaign for Woman Suffrage in the United States began with the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848, women did not gain the right to vote until 1920. Many students believe that only men opposed Women Suffrage but many women opposed suffrage also. In this lesson students will analyze primary documents to discover what the opposing views on Women’s Suffrage were in the early twentieth century. Students will demonstrate their understanding of these ideas by writing a letter to the editor explaining their viewpoint from an early twentieth century perspective. In the second part of the lesson students will be challenged to determine how women were able to obtain suffrage with no political power. Students will examine primary documents to discover the tactics and strategies that women suffragists used to gain suffrage.
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• Everyday Life in the 1950s - This lesson serves as an introduction to primary source documents in preparation for research middle school students will do for National History Day.
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• Annotate, Narrate, and Recreate Primary Documents - This lesson is actually 3 lessons that can be used in any unit, era, or theme. Allow students to add observations, questions and narration directly to digital documents and share them without printing. They make use of web applications that are free and easy to use. Offline options are included. Given the fickle nature of web tools please contact me via twitter for alternatives, if say one of the sites closes or stops working.
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• Who Deserves the Cabinet Position? - This lesson is designed to teach students about the importance of the President’s Cabinet. They use evaluations, which were sent to President Hoover to determine who they would choose as a member of Cabinet.
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• Where in the World is Herbert Hoover? - Herbert Hoover traveled extensively throughout his life for his mining and political careers. This activity will introduce students to some of the many areas of the world that Herbert Hoover traveled to by having students look at primary and secondary sources to guess the country that the clues are guiding them to and having the students map out the travels of Herbert Hoover.
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• On the Move - Students use primary source documents to determine causes of immigration. Students evaluate current US and world conditions related to emigration.
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• America in the 1950s: A Time of Triumph or Tragedy? - In this collaborative (partner) project-based lesson, students will create websites that serve as a platform for primary resource analysis. Once the websites are completed, students will view peer sites in order to determine whether they believe the 1950s were a time of triumph, or a time of tragedy in the United States. This project is most suitable for classrooms/classes with access to technology as well as a certain degree of comfort with using internet resources and website-generating platforms.
   
  
• A Historiography of President Herbert Hoover’s Actions in the Great Depression - This is a historiographical paper over the actions Herbert Hoover took as President during the Great Depression. A historiographical paper is an analysis of multiple sources, over multiple years. More simply put, a historiographical paper is studying how history has been written over the years. The paper begins with an analysis of writings done in the 1930’s, when Hoover was still President, and continues through the years, ending in the more modern time of 2009. The reader will be able to analyze how authors have viewed and written about Hoover for over sixty years, and how opinions have changed over those years. The paper will also offer references to educators or researchers, who wish to find scholarly sources on Herbert Hoover. To supplement the writing, primary sources have been added, which is intended to give students practice with primary documents.
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