Teaching high school history with picture books can enliven social studies content, advance students’ higher-order thinking skills, and help facilitate differentiated instruction.

Quality children’s literature, specifically picture books, can be extremely helpful to teach social studies concepts to students of all ages, including secondary, by sharing important messages through simplistic, imagery-filled text. Learning names and dates is not enough. We must be prepared to help children ask questions, and discover their answers through creative thinking, reasoning, judging, and understanding. Presenter Jessica Torre ESC Region 12, Waco, TX

Picture books often address complex topics and can provide a visually arresting approach for teaching secondary as well as special needs students.

The authors show how elementary-school age students and teachers can use picture books, young adult literature, and poetry to uncover and explore the hidden histories and untold stories of Elizabeth Jennings, Ida B. Wells, Jackie Robinson, Sarah Keys Evans, and Claudette Colvin, among others, and their protests for African Americans’ right to ride in trains, streetcars, buses, and other forms of public transportation. 

Some key strategies can help provide students with a balanced picture of the founding fathers while honoring the lives, stories, and experiences of victims of slavery.

This article draws on my reflections from a year-long study in a first-grade classroom in a Midwestern public elementary school during which the author read and discussed a total of fourteen Asian American picture books with the class. In this article, she discusses the children’s interactions with Asian American stories and provides suggestions for using children’s literature to teach about Asian American history and culture.

The 100th anniversary year of the Nineteenth Amendment offers an important opportunity to deepen student understanding of the women’s suffrage movement.

This article models how to teach civic dispositions using popular trade books that do not have an obvious connection to critical themes (e.g., power, privilege, identity). In doing so, the authors show how to create opportunities to teach civic dispositions within a school environment that may forbid some books as “too controversial” or that might accept lessons that gradually introduce students (and their parents) to a topic that may be controversial.  While focusing on the read aloud as an opportunity for civic learning, the authors describe how the pedagogical frameworks of critical…

Those who would ban or burn books recognize that the threat to their power comes when people learn to think for themselves.