Literature Based Curriculum for Social Sciences by Tori Kessel

Now is an opportune time to incorporate literature into your curriculum because Common Core Standards, which many schools are making the switch to, rather than focusing on specific facts and figures, focus on broader concepts, critical thinking, and navigating through knowledge achieved. These can be achieved by reading a historical book and learning how to gain and assess the information from it. Literature based curriculum for any subjects not only provide a foundation for students to learn and build their specific standards, but are optimal for achieving the goal of the common core standards to prepare students for literary college and career reediness through having standards that focus on results rather than means allowing for greater flexibility and creativity for teachers in their curriculum development (Common Core page iv). Common core Language Arts standards especially put huge emphasis on reading and saying that to build a foundation for college and career readiness, students must read widely and deeply from among a broad range of high-quality, increasingly challenging literary and informational texts . Through reading a variety of texts, and responding to them in writing, class discussion, expressive projects, and reviews, children learn at a young age, not only the historical knowledge they gain from the text, but deep skills developed from reading widely. The books presented in the chart are books of a broad range, high-quality, various difficulties, and are both informational and literary.
Idea for Curriculum: 1. Focus on Each Standard for a month to a month and a half. 2. Start off each unit with a read aloud book correlating to that standard. Do one writing response to the read aloud. 3. Choose one Historical Fiction or Biographical Chapter book to read as a class, silently and aloud to focus on as your literature for that unit. Respond to both the literary aspect as well as highlight historical aspects, allowing for students to do any further research they desire on a particular aspect of the historical literature that sparks their interest. 4. Have out during the unit the Informational text associated with the unit. Have question, based on the breakdown of the standards that children need to find throughout their study through researching that (or other) informational texts. 5. At the end of the chapter book, have children do a writing response. This could be an amazon review or compare contrast or expository or informational writing. You can choose a different form of writing to focus on and teach after each book.

Good Book Series with a variety of American History: American Girl My Name is America (Boys Journals) Dear American (Girls Journals) Magic Tree House (Not all Historical but Thanksgiving on Thursday, Revolutionary War on Wednesday, Civil War on Sunday and Abe Lincoln at Last are a few of them) You Wouldnt Want to Be (On The Mayflower, An American Colonist, At the Boston Tea Party, An American Pioneer, A Civil War Soldier, Exploring with Lewis and Clark) Who Was Biographies for Kids