Teacher Picks for the Geography Classroom

I try to implement one book study a year with my geography students. Why? Not only does it allow me to incorporate reading and comprehension skills by collaborating with the language arts teacher to integrate language arts skills, but it can bring to life the topic or concept being explored. I find using interactive notebooks along with the book study allows students to keep all of their work in one place and gives them the opportunity to review the information and see what they learned at the end of the study.

I am an avid non-fiction reader, and it is my belief that it helps to have students read memoirs of actual events written by those who experienced them. Memoirs bring to light how the event not only influenced history but also those who lived during the time period and event.

Here are some books that I love to share with students:

I AM MALALA

The story begins as two stories, told in alternating sections, about two eleven-year-olds in Sudan, a girl in 2008 and a boy in 1985. The girl, Nya, is fetching water daily from a pond that is two hours’ walk. The boy, Salva, becomes one of the “lost boys” of Sudan, refugees who cover the African continent on foot as they search for their families.

Click here for teaching resources to go along with the book study.

I AM MALALA
Malala Yousafzai was only ten years old when the Taliban took control of her region. They said music was a crime. They said women weren’t allowed to go to the market. They said girls couldn’t go to school. Raised in a once-peaceful area of Pakistan transformed by terrorism, Malala was taught to stand up for what she believes. So she fought for her right to be educated.

Click here for teaching resources to go along with the book study.

CHINESE CINDERELLA

Adeline’s powerful family considers her bad luck after her mother dies giving birth to her, and life does not get any easier when her father remarries. Adeline and her siblings are face disdain of her stepmother, while her stepbrother and stepsister are spoiled with attention. She yearns for is the love of her family.

Click here for teaching resources to go along with the book study.

NIGHT

Night is Elie Wiesel’s masterpiece, a candid, horrific, and deeply poignant autobiographical account of his survival as a teenager in the Nazi death camps. This new translation by Marion Wiesel, Elie’s wife, and frequent translator, presents this seminal memoir in the language and spirit truest to the author’s original intent. Night offers much more than a litany of the daily terrors, everyday perversions, and rampant sadism at Auschwitz

Click here for teaching resources to go along with the book study.

JACOB’S RESCUE

Once Jacob Gutgeld lived with his family in a beautiful house in Warsaw, Poland. He went to school and played hide-and-seek in the woods with his friends. But everything changed the day the Nazi soldiers invaded in 1939. Suddenly it wasn’t safe to be Jewish anymore.

Click here for teaching resources to go along with the book study.

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