As social scientists and readers, we have been reading two historical fiction books recently. You may have heard your fourth grader talking about Blood on the River. It is a book that tells a fictionalized narrative account of Jamestown written by Elisa Carbone. She leads each chapter with an excerpt of a primary source (a direct account of what happened at an event). The main character and narrator of the book is a boy who serves as John Smith's page, named Samuel. He is just about the age of your children, and provides them a view of the events involved in settling a town in a very different land through the lens of someone just learning the ins and outs of early 1600s English social life.
I love this book because of the ways that Samuel has to navigate the settings, the relationships, and the conflicts throughout Jamestown. This provides our kids a chance to live through his life and struggles in order to continually remind them the ways of life and types of interactions that were happening at the time. So often, it is easy to hear a part of this book and have a quick epiphany that the characters HAD to do something a given way because of a lack of electricity or GPS! These historical fiction books help us to develop our own mental image of the historical context from which we can then construct our understandings of the events more fully.
The book we have just started reading right now is called Chains. It is written by Laurie Halse Anderson, another incredibly well-researched author. She again leads each chapter with a quote from a primary source, many of which come from letters between John Adams (our second President) and his wife Abigail. The ways we learn about the characters and through the primary sources help us to get a much more detailed image in our minds of the ways things were back then. This book is another favorite of mine. It is told through the eyes of Isabel, a girl whose family was enslaved. She and her sister were born in Rhode Island, were separated from her father, and their mother passed away. She is now working for a family on the Island of Manhattan at the time that the colonies are just gearing up to send a Declaration of Independence to King George. The book begins in May of 1776. Isabel helps us to start figuring out the tensions between Loyalists and Patriots, Slaves and Slave Owners, Citizens and Soldiers, and many other seemingly polarized groups of people. However, just as we find in Blood on the River, the tensions may appear to be between the characters only, but we find that those tensions may more poignantly play out within the hearts of those characters we grow to know so closely.
We also use these books to learn more about reading process, strategic thinking, ways to more deeply understand our reading, and ways to talk about books.
One other way we process our learning as social scientists involves creating posters that will comprise our timeline in the classroom from what we've learned in history. Enjoy the posters below as examples of some of the learning we have done lately!
