Saturday, August 12, 2006
Teacher's Guide to The American Story
One thing I should have mentioned earlier is that there is a terrific teacher's guide for this book, created for Random House by Judy Freeman, a children's book conultant. The guide is on the back of a wonderful poster featuring the Statue of Liberty reading a book, as painted by the exceptional illustrator of The American Story, Roger Roth. The reason I thought to bring this up is because I'm working on a total revamp of my website, and it is going to include some teaching activities using The American Story. Part of my intent in the structure of the book was to make it something very very useful for teachers in the classroom. Honest to Pete, I think this should become every teacher's American history textbook!
Blog Bookmark Gadgets
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
What a wonderful idea for a book -- thank you. I'm an American in Canada, the mother of three little dual citizens, and I can't wait to see it. I've already asked our librarian to make a point of bringing the book in, because a lot of US history books, especially for the junior set, tend to be overlooked up here, unfortunately...
Just a few suggestions to get the word out (in my previous life, before becoming an organic farming, homeschooling mother, I did some PR work): don't forget the homeschool market, especially the secular homeschoolers who are desperate for quality material. Whatever percentage of public and private school teachers and librarians will select TAS for their curricula and programs could easily be doubled, or more, among the home education crowd, whether or not they're secular. We're the folks whose crazy kids, like Chris Barton
's son, read these sorts of books for fun...
Whether it's something as small as having a "Home Educator's Guide to the American Story" along with the "Teacher's Guide" or a mention of homeschoolers on your website, or as big (and I appreciate all the constraints on your time right now with book tours and interviews) as a few special homeschool readings at local libraries (homeschoolers like things during the day, by the way...), it will go a long way toward awakening the homeschool crowd to a great new book. I know NYC children's librarian/blogger Fuse #8 hosts a homeschool book group at the children's book room of the NYPL where she works, for example. And I bet she'd blog about it, and then so would all the other kidlit bloggers, and the homeschool bloggers, and so on and on...
Great good luck!
What a good suggestion -- I'll see what I can do about reaching out to the home schooling community.
Thanks!
Post a Comment