Gateways to Westward Expansion : Using Literature and Primary Sources to Enhance Reading Instruction and Historical Understanding

Gateways to Westward Expansion is a teacher resource for history teachers and will complement the standard history curriculum, providing choice and flexibility for teachers by offering strategies which deepen understanding of historical content while developing reading skills. Covering ten topics pertinent to the development of the western United States from the early nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the authors focus on presenting lesser known voices and viewpoints of groups impacted by the steady westward march of Euro-American settlement. Each topic is introduced through a gateway literature selection counterbalanced with a primary source document. Fiction is the emotional hook, which engages students in a time period while the primary source document develops content. Providing teachers with organizational structures, bibliographies and reproducibles to facilitate ease of implementation, this title is useful to teachers as they introduce historical eras and aide students in finding project ideas for the National History Day competition—all the while integrating the teaching of reading—a NCLB response and introducing students to primary source documents, another tested concept. Each chapter offers sparks for inquiry. Grades 4-12.