Link Up!- Social Studies Text

I'm linking up again- I swear someday soon I will get on here and do an update!

Ok.  Social Studies.  This is my weakest area, mostly because it is my first year teaching it, I strongly dislike our textbook, and I haven't found a way to pull all our curriculum together so that I like it.  It is on the (rather long) list of things to work on this summer.  So I'm glad we have this little link party so that I can scope out the other books that teachers are using and start to grow my classroom library in this area.

So since I don't have an abundance of awesome mentor texts that I love, I'm grabbing one that we have referenced a shocking amount of times this year- both in and out of our social studies block.   And that book is John, Paul, George, & Ben by Lane Smith.

If you haven't heard of it, it's about John Hancock, Paul Revere, George Washington, and Ben Franklin (and also Thomas Jefferson).  The book itself is written for 3-7 year olds, but the humor goes way above that level- I'm surprised that is what it is recommended for actually.  My 10 year old students didn't get much of the humor the first time we read it.  After we learned more about each of these men, we read the book again and went through page by page to see what the author wrote and why it was included for that person.  After that, my students got the humor and would joke about it with each other.

In fourth grade, we talk about signing the Constitution and who our founding fathers are- and we also study Ben Franklin during our electricity unit in science.  This year my students referred back to this book during that unit and we read his pages AGAIN to see if we understood it more (we did!).

So for a simple story, we have used it all year long!  Even as I'm sitting here I'm thinking of things I can do with this unit (and book) for next year.  Add it to the list...

Link up!