KidCitizen
KidCitizen introduces a new way for young students (K-5) to engage with history through primary sources.
In KidCitizen’s nine interactive episodes, children explore civics and government concepts by investigating primary source photographs from the Library of Congress. They also connect what they find with their daily lives. KidCitizen draws on game-based learning best practices, and primary source analysis strategies from the Library of Congress Teaching with Primary Sources program.
From the KidCitizen episode "Congress and Child Labor" where children explore a series of photographs by Lewis Hine
and how they helped convince Congress decide to pass laws to protect children.
Each KidCitizen episode capitalizes on the active and social nature of young children's learning. They use primary sources for rich demonstrations, interactions, and models of literacy in the course of innovative hands-on activities that make academic content meaningful, build on prior experiences, and foster visual literacy and historical inquiry.
KidCitizen also includes cloud software tools that let educators create their own episodes and share them with students. Using KidCitizen tools, educators can create activities using primary source photographs that are especially relevant to their students and community. The KidCitizen tools runs on the Muzzy Lane Author platform.
KidCitizen Episodes run on PCs, Macs, and iOS and Android mobile devices. The nine episodes can be accessed from the KidCitizen website www.kidcitizen.net. All are free to play and are accompanied by a teacher’s guide. KidCitizen is part of the the Civics and Primary Sources Project and is supported by a grant from the Library of Congress.
KidCitizen Team
KidCitizen is led by Bert Snow and by Dr. Ilene Berson (Professor and coordinator of Early Childhood Programs at the University of South Florida), and Dr. Michael Berson (Professor of Social Science Education at the University of South Florida and a Senior Fellow in The Florida Joint Center for Citizenship.). It has been developed in collaboration with the Muzzy Lane development team.