Notable Books, Notable Lessons: Putting Social Studies Back in the K-8 Curriculum

by Andrea S. Libresco, Jeannette Balantic, and Mary Battenfeld

9781440840791

231 pages

8 1/2" x 11"

When the right picture and chapter books are used, they can effectively serve "double duty" to teach both language arts and social studies to elementary and middle school students.

This book provides teachers, librarians, and education methods professors with strategies, lesson plans, and activities that enable them to use literature as a springboard to social studies thematic instruction.

With the amount of time and resources allocated to teaching social studies being significantly reduced, social studies lessons need to be incorporated into other subjects. Notable Books, Notable Lessons: Putting Social Studies Back in the K–8 Curriculum offers the tools to teach students social studies concepts that are increasingly relevant and essential in today's diverse, globalized world—lessons that are vital in order to prepare students to think critically and participate in our multicultural democracy.

Providing information that elementary and middle school teachers and librarians, district-level curriculum directors and principals, staff developers, and social studies and literacy methods professors will find extremely useful, this book uses the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS)/Children's Book Council (CBC)'s current and past lists of Notable Books at the elementary and middle school levels to offer easy-to-follow lesson plans that integrate social studies instruction with reading and language arts. The lesson plans pose compelling questions to facilitate discussion and critical thinking and suggest engaging activities that are connected to the social studies concepts. The book also includes sample student handouts for the selected pieces of literature.

Features

• Uses award-winning books to integrate social studies and English language arts
• Provides engaging, ready-to-use lesson plans that encourage hands-on engagement
• Suggests activities that connect to the social studies concepts, require thoughtful, active engagement, and foster critical thinking
• Includes annotated bibliographies, linked to the thematic strands of each chapter, of other books from the lists of Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People, selected by the National Council for the Social Studies and Children's Book Council