AI Blocks › Teach and train people
Close reading lesson builder for history
Give it a history source. Get a lesson series that teaches learners to read word choice, tone and bias.
Close reading lesson builder for history is a free AI skill for the job "Teach and train people". Give the instructions to an AI assistant that supports the required files and tools, then review its output.
Free · No account · CC BY SA 4.0 licence · Made by Gareth Manning
Made by Gareth Manning. See the original on GitHub; we copied it as it is, with its licence.
What it does
A lesson series that teaches learners to read a history source for how it says things, not only what it says. Students often summarise a document and stop. Here they learn to treat word choice, tone and claims as clues to the writer's view. The plan lays out three levels: a learner who just pulls out facts, one who spots emotive words but does not connect them to the author, and one who ties specific language to the writer's position and purpose. It then gives a modelled think-aloud, a shared practice task and an independent task. It adds prompts for analysing language, typical mistakes, and marking indicators. It also explains how history reading differs from literary reading.
You give it
- The topic
- Learners' age or year
- What students do now when they read sources
- Documents you plan to use (optional)
- Prior close reading teaching (optional)
You get
- Three levels of close reading with signs of each
- A modelled, shared and independent teaching sequence
- Prompts on word choice and tone
- Common mistakes and marking indicators
Use it when
- Students summarise sources without commenting on the language.
- You want learners to notice loaded words and what they reveal.
- You teach history and literature and need to separate the two skills.
- You are building a unit on bias in primary sources.
How to use it
- Add it to your AI once: download it and add the folder to Claude, ChatGPT or Codex as a skill.
- Ask for the job in your own words. Your AI opens the skill when it fits.