U.S. History Through Children's Literature » (New Edition)

WANDA J. MILLER is Reading Specialist, Williamson Central Schools, Williamson, New York. She serves on the New York State Curriculum Committee.

Allow students to step back in time to experience the thoughts, feelings, dilemmas, and actions of people from history. For each history topic, Miller suggests two titles-one for use with the entire class and one for use with small reading groups. Summaries of the books, author information, activities, and topics for discussion are supplemented with vocabulary lists and ideas for research topics and further reading. This integrated approach makes history meaningful to students and helps them retain historical details and facts.

School Library Journal

Intended for use by teachers in grades four through eight, this substantial handbook/bibliography offers plentiful, ready-made preparation for using quality fiction and nonfiction trade books to teach U.S. history. Each of the nine chronological units begins with a suggested book for whole-class reading, goes on to suggest books for small groups, and concludes with a lengthy annotated list of additional children's books, teacher resources, computer resources, and videos. The entries on featured books include brief synopses, author information, teaching activities, discussion questions, and vocabulary lists. There are suggested end-of-unit activities, along with occasional recipes, games, and forms for guiding and evaluating children's work. The book's emphasis is on building classroom libraries, with only a brief nod to use by school and public libraries. (Any library containing all the listed material would be quite good.) America As Story: Historical Fiction for Middle and Secondary Schools by Rosemary K. Coffey and Elizabeth F. Howard (ALA, 2nd ed., 1997) overlaps on many titles, and also includes teaching suggestions. But U.S. History Through Children's Literature is far more extensive in scope, making a fine range of books and other materials accessible to teachers and librarians.Margaret Bush, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College, Boston, MA