Claudette Colvin, in 1955, was a 15-year-old African American girl growing up in Alabama. She refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama a full nine months before Rosa Parks later became famous by doing the same thing.
Phil Hoose on history in the making
Claudette Colvin, in 1955, was a 15-year-old African American girl growing up in Alabama. She refused to surrender her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama a full nine months before Rosa Parks later became famous by doing the same thing.
In this post, I encourage you to bring authors into your classroom to add a personal dimension to social studies lessons. Autobiographical accounts, for example, can offer first-person perspectives on events under discussion. And authors who research and write about historical and cultural topics often present their interpretations and sources while revealing their methods and processes.
In this post, I invite you to introduce a multimedia dimension to your students’ series reading. Children love series fiction. They enjoy the familiarity of the storylines, become comfortable with the formulas, and delight in the characters’ idiosyncrasies. Educators appreciate that these titles are accessible to all children—from the voracious readers who never put a book down to the English Language Learners who build on the successful completion of one volume to move confidently on to the next.