(Hours after I wrote this post, HRW’s Social Studies website stopped working again.  I’ve removed their links from my pages.  You might want to check on their site now and then to see if you can access it. )

Of all the textbook publishers, I believe Holt, Rhinehart and Winston has online social studies activities that are the  most accessible to English Language Learners.  However, a big problem is that their social studies site isn’t working a lot of the time.  One would think a company the size of HRW would be able to maintain their online presence a little better.

It’s finally working again.  For now, I’ve just posted three separate links to parts of their site.  In the past, I’ve had many more, but then I’ve had to take them all down after the HRW site has stopped working for months at a time (this has happened three (and now four) times).

The three links I’ve placed on my website are:

* HRW United States History, which is on my Geography and United States History page under the Sites That Cover Many Periods section.  You can access summaries of each chapter in many different languages, which is great to incorporate in a “Preview, View, and Review” teaching methodology in an ESL classroom.

* HRW World History, which is on my World History page under Sites That Cover Many Periods of World History.  This is set-up the same way as the U.S. History site is, with summary translations in multiple languages.

* HRW Geography, which is on my Geography page under Sites That Cover Many Areas.  On this link, just click on any of the books, then the chapters in the books, and then their “Interactive Features.”  The summaries are “only” in English and Spanish, but a lot of these Interactive Features are excellent.

Check out these sites as soon as you can, since there is no guarantee they’ll stay up.  If they actually do remain up and running, I’ll set-up direct links to many of the interactive activities under the appropriate categories on my site.  I just don’t want to go through all that work again until I know HRW has figured out a way to keep their site online.