Primary sources are real stuff and real stuff is powerful stuff. Civil War photographs. E.B. White's drafts for Charlotte's Web. An heirloom quilt. Birth certificates. All evoke actual past times and events. And no matter how well written, no textbook can provide the same sense of being there, of the realness that primary sources provide. They help us as nothing else does to begin to understand the past. 
 Seeking History is one of the first books about using primary sources in elementary and middle school classrooms to enhance and deepen students' grapplings with history. You'll read about students working as scholars as they tussle with old language and spelling in a three-hundred-year-old journal . . . compare their own photographs of a local street with others taken in 1904 and 1975 . . . view an early film to see what it can tell them about early twentieth-century immigrants . . . examine household objects to determine what life was like long ago. And they do even more, taking what they've discovered to create interpretations of their own. These students use primary sources as historians, literary scholars, artists, writers, and more. Primary sources enrich every facet of their learning. 
 Best of all, Monica Edinger offers lots of ideas and resources you can put to immediate use: types of primary sources; tips on finding and preparing primary sources for student use; personal, local, and remote history activities; detailed descriptions of immigration, Constitution, and Africa projects; guidelines for using primary sources to teach literature, writing, and art; and teaching strategies for interpreting text, images, and objects. A companion CD, packaged with the book, offers even more support with links to websites, reproducible handouts, and sample student work.

Seeking History: Teaching with Primary Sources in Grades 4-6

Business & Money

Edinger, Monica

Accounting

Heinemann

Teacher Monica Edinger shares fantastic literature response activities that encourage students to dig deep into favorite books, mining them for meaning and connections to real life and other texts. As they analyze literary elements and interpret story events, students practice reading strategies and hone comprehension skills. Includes reproducible student response packets, discussion questions, literature connections, Internet links, and background information for units on Charlotte’s Web, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, and The Wizard of Oz. For use with Grades 3-6.

Using Beloved Classics to Deepen Reading Comprehension: Rich Lessons and Literature Response Activities That Improve Kids Reading Comprehension, ... and Really Engage Each and Every Reader

Children's Books

Teaching Strategies

Comparative study of Cinderella Stories, Literary analysis of Charlotte's Web; Responding to Alice in Wonderland through Art; Comparing the book and film versions of The Wizard of Oz. Meant for grades 2-6

Fantasy Literature in the Elementary Classroom: Strategies for Reading, Writing, and Responding

Scholastic Teaching Resources

Inspired by a true account, here is the compelling story of a child who arrives in America on the slave ship Amistad —and eventually makes her way home to Africa. When a drought hits her homeland in Sierra Leone, nine-year-old Magulu is sold as a pawn by her father in exchange for rice. But before she can work off her debt, an unthinkable chain of events unfolds: a capture by slave traders; weeks in a dark and airless hold; a landing in Cuba, where she and three other children are sold and taken aboard the Amistad; a mutiny aboard ship; a trial in New Haven that eventually goes all the way to the Supreme Court and is argued in the Africans’ favor by John Quincy Adams. Narrated in a remarkable first-person voice, this fictionalized book of memories of a real-life figure retells history through the eyes of a child — from seeing mirrors for the first time and struggling with laughably complicated clothing to longing for family and a home she never forgets. Lush, full-color illustrations by Robert Byrd, plus archival photographs and documents, bring an extraordinary journey to life.

Africa Is My Home: A Child of the Amistad

Literature & Fiction

Candlewick

“A remarkable story of resilience, faith, and hope.” — School Library Journal (starred review) Inspired by a true account, here is the compelling story of a child who arrives in America on the slave ship Amistad—and eventually makes her way home to Africa. Narrated in a remarkable first-person voice, this fictionalized book of memories of a real-life figure retells history through the eyes of a child. Lush, full-color illustrations by Robert Byrd, plus archival photographs and documents, bring an extraordinary journey to life.

If you want to make your history teaching more meaningful to your students and more rewarding to yourself, welcome to Monica Edinger's classroom, where studying long ago events and far away places is a vital, exciting collaboration.
Monica's fourth-grade students are historians. They consider events from their own lives, use oral history to explore other people's stories, investigate multiple perspectives, and examine documents and artifacts to interpret historical events. They experiment with ways of telling history: writing personal histories, creating picture books, producing research reports, and staging performances. Together Monica and her students grapple with the complexities of the past in order to make better sense of the present. Examining immigration from the perspective of a recent arrival from the Caribbean or from a Pilgrim hundreds of years ago makes history real and compelling to these young historians.
As one classroom teacher's personal narrative on the development, teaching, and assessment of her curriculum, Far Away and Long Ago features:an overview of current issues regarding history in the elementary school;curriculum units ranging from the near to the far, from the recent to the distant past, including topics such as memoir, immigration, Native Americans, and the Pilgrims;detailed descriptions on how each unit was developed, taught, and assessed;examples and analysis of student work;teaching goals and reflections on the complexities of teaching history today.
Woven throughout this personal narrative are practical suggestions written by co-author, Stephanie Fins, a museum educator, who collaborated with Monica as she developed and taught her history curriculum. Stephanie provides a rich variety of practical teaching suggestions, topic extensions, and professional resources:Zooming In: informational essays on topics that support the historical content.Booktalks: reviews of relevant professional books.Tools of the Trade: practical ideas to support and extend classroom work.On-Line Resources: related Internet sites that offer text, images, audio material, and “virtual” tours of historic sites.
Far Away and Long Ago will expand the ways teachers think about history and provide elementary and middle school practitioners with new ways to teach this lively subject.

Far Away and Long Ago: Young Historians in the Classroom

Fins, Stephanie

Education & Reference

Routledge

Nearer My Freedom: The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano by Himself

Millions of Africans were enslaved during the transatlantic slave trade, but few recorded their personal experiences. Olaudah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano is perhaps the most well known of the autobiographies that exist. Using this narrative as a primary source text, authors Monica Edinger and Lesley Younge share Equiano's life story in "found verse," supplemented with annotations to give readers historical context. This poetic approach provides interesting analysis and synthesis, helping readers to better understand the original text. Follow Equiano from his life in Africa as a child to his enslavement at a young age, his travels across the Atlantic Ocean and Mediterranean Sea, his liberation, and his life as a free man.

Teen & Young Adult

Younge, Lesley

Biographies

Zest Books ™

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Books by Edinger, Monica

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Edinger, Monica. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Seeking History: Teaching with Primary Sources in Grades 4-6

Using Beloved Classics to Deepen Reading Comprehension: Rich Lessons and Literature Response Activities That Improve Kids Reading Comprehension, ... and Really Engage Each and Every Reader

Fantasy Literature in the Elementary Classroom: Strategies for Reading, Writing, and Responding

Africa Is My Home: A Child of the Amistad

Africa Is My Home: A Child of the Amistad

Far Away and Long Ago: Young Historians in the Classroom

Nearer My Freedom: The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano by Himself

Nearer My Freedom: The Interesting Life of Olaudah Equiano by Himself