Picture Books Become TEXT SETS

History Mysteries

Picture Books become TEXT SETS:

Sources of unknown, untold, unheralded stories of the “forgotten ones”

Materials:

Picture books, each with a colored sticky note on the cover coded to the topic, are displayed around the room in text set groups under category signs on the wall:

Women: Equality When?

WWII: Japanese-Americans: Citizens?

Civil Rights: How Long?

America’s Native Peoples: Citizens?

Opener:

“What do we know about Pocohantas and John Smith?”

“Where did we learn this information?”

Disney’s trailer for the movie: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q1QF8G47oU

“What do historians know about Pocohantas?”

“Where would we learn this information?

Virtual Jamestown site: http://www.virtualjamestown.org/Pocahontas.html

“One is cultural history, well known but actually mythmaking by the Disney movie, the other is factual history, hidden, obscured and left out of textbooks and students’ view.”

Two voice telling of the facts of the life of Pocahontas, a remarkable and important woman in history.

“To help students acquire the history accuracy missing in the history classes, we have a source most of us have not seen.”

Just as Milton Rogovin photographed ‘the forgotten ones’ to make them visible through history, picture books are sources of information about the forgotten ones: people and events in history not mentioned in text books or lectures.

Site coordinators preview 3 titles from Civil Rights: How Long?

showing a textset that provides a historical timeline.

Henry’s Freedom Box, A True Story from the Underground Railroad mid 1880s

A Home Run for Bunny mid 1930s

Freedom Walkers: The Story of the Montgomery Bus Boycott mid 1950s

Both site coordinators read aloud the first two page of A Home Run for Bunny, one in regular voice, the other in radio reading style.

Radio reading is defined as phrasing, tempo, voice, and reading as if one is telling a story. This is demonstrated by reading four pages, the first two and two more pages in the middle of the story.

Activity:

Tutors are invited to peruse the text sets and choose a picture book to radio read with a partner.

The character and the historical circumstances that the book describes will be what the pair presents to the audience of other tutors/readers.

Then each will radio read two pages of the picture book to the audience.

Closer:

How do we learn what we do not know historically?

Picture books are short synopses, biographies, news accounts of people and events that have consequences influencing our lives today.

TEXT SETS of picture books provide information not in text books to find those forgotten, unheralded or unknown people and events.

Elementary through high school, TEXT SETS including picture books, graphic novels, and comic book formats are resources for history mysteries as pictures of the times.

Annually, the journal, Social Education, from NCSS, National Council of the Social Studies, publishes an annotated bibliography of Notable Social Studies Tradebooks for Young People hardcopy and online:

http://www.socialstudies.org/resources/notable