Reading
History: A Practical Guide to Improving Literacy.
Janet Allen with Christine Landaker.
New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 176. $30.00, hardcover. ISBN:
0-19-516595-0. TEL: 212-726-6057 • FAX: 212-726-6446
A new generation of students raised on technology and electronic media is
increasingly difficult to entice into reading content texts. Educators need
new tools to integrate better reading skills in every subject, and good narrative
nonfiction is an excellent way to do so. Here is a hands-on program to bolster
classroom reading, writing, and critical thinking, using A History of Us (also
published by Oxford University Press) as a model.
The strategies discussed here are all classroom tested, with students’
work interspersed throughout the book to provide a clear understanding of
the strategies in action.
This book gives teachers varied instructional strategies to make history lessons
accessible and help students connect personally with history. Strategies are
grouped as: assessing and building background knowledge strategies that help
students develop an appreciation for history, supporting and monitoring comprehension
strategies to make historical texts understandable to all readers, and extending
and transferring strategies that provide ways for students to show their knowledge
of history and then transfer it to current events.
Extensive additional resources help teachers supplement textbooks: annotations
of important professional books, a list of useful websites, resources for
further research, and many sets of texts to support thematic or unit-based
instruction in social studies. Graphic organizers to support instruction for
student thinking and learning are also included, ready for duplication for
use in the classroom.
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