Social Studies Mentor Text Linky

I'm linking up with Amanda and Stacia at Collaboration Cuties for "must read social studies mentor texts." First, let me say I LOVE this linky! I struggled last year to find good books for our social studies standards, but books are SO useful to help kids "get it" (and remember it!). This is definitely true when studying people, which is about 90% of our SS standards. My favorite book that we read is Moses about Harriet Tubman.
 

This book does a great job of going through Harriet's life and helping kids (even my firsties) understand why she did what she did and how she must have felt. As a disclaimer, it's a little religious (you might guess that from the title) but it's a GREAT book! After we read this, we made a Harriet Tubman fact quilt that I talked about on my blog here.

I hope you'll link up and share your favorite social studies books! Click on the picture above to link up!

Quilting with Harriet Tubman

You know those moments when you do a project with your students, and it turns it out SO cute!? I totally had one of those moments yesterday! We've been learning about the life of Harriet Tubman for the last couple of weeks. As our final activity, we made a quilt of her life. We had a sheet of facts about her life (I'm sorry I don't have it to share, but it's just basic facts from the span of her life. I think it would be easy to recreate). Each child chose a fact and illustrated it. We had 12 facts and 23 kids, so most facts were used twice. Then we taped them together to make our quilt. Here's the finished project:

I think the reason I'm so proud is because of the details my students used in their picture (which has been an issue this year). We went through each fact and talked about how we could illustrate it. Initially, my students kept saying "draw her helping people" and I had to keep asking "What does that mean???? What am I going to draw to show that she's helping people?" Finally, they started getting more specific. Planning their illustrations really helped them in the details department. Here's an example...the student said "She was hiding behind a tree from the people looking for her."

This one is a little gory...ironically it was made by my sweetest child. She told me Harriet got hit in the head, and she even drew the blood! Maybe this is TOO much detail...

Of course, some students still wanted to draw a train for the Underground Railroad. Oh well. You take the good, you take the bad...   =)