Serendipity35

Creating the US Teacher Institute might be of interest to you if you are interested in learning strategies to teach about the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights using Library of Congress primary sources. Chances are the available slots will be full by the time you read this. Of course, you can also use the materials found online without the Institute.

Participants will leave with strategies and materials they can use in their schools. The institute uses the Library's exhibition Creating the United States as its foundation. Participants will learn how to make this era in our country’s history “come alive” for students using images, manuscripts, letters, photographs, maps, and poetry.

Imagination and vision played critical roles in the creative act of forming a self-governing United States of America. The collections of the Library of Congress are unquestionably the world’s best source for documenting the process. This exhibition offers a remarkable opportunity to learn in a fresh new way how the founding documents that emerged from this period were forged out of insight, invention, and creativity, as well as collaboration and much compromise.

Through the trials of war and peace the founders created a unique government—a republic across an enormous geographic region and encompassing a vast variety of cultural complexities. Although living up to the principles of humanity laid down in the Declaration of Independence has been an arduous journey, the exhibition demonstrates that the Declaration, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights are living instruments that are central to the evolution of the United States.