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UPDATE: See This Free History Resource Is GREAT For ELL Newcomers!

 

I have used America’s Story for years in my U.S. History classes for Intermediate English Language Learners, and like it a lot.

However, even those books are too advanced for Newcomers.

The second portion of this post shares a tweet I put out looking for suggestions of U.S. History books accessible to Newcomers.  The many responses I received are also included, though I’m not sure any of them really “fit the bill.”

I find myself having to write a lot of the text for the Newcomers in my combined Intermediate/Beginners History class.  Here is a downloadable example of what I wrote about the Louisiana Purchase.  A map is included in the document, but here’s the text.

 

A man named Napoleon was the ruler of France in the early 1800’s.  He was fighting many wars, and needed money.

France owned all the land in white on the map.  They said they owned it even though Native Americans lived there and had lived there for thousands of years.

Thomas Jefferson was President of the United States in 1803, and the U.S. bought the land in white for $15 million dollars.  It is called the Louisiana Purchase.  The present state of Louisiana was part of it.

Jefferson sent a group of people who spent two years exploring the area.  It was led by two men, Meriwether Lewis and William Clark.  It is known as the Lewis and Clark Expedition.  An enslaved man named York and a Native American woman named Sacagawea helped the Lewis and Clark Expedition be successful.

 

Reading that text together (while using various reading strategies for Newcomers), preceded by watching a Brainpop video in Spanish on Westward Expansion (a modified version of the  old preview/view/review), and then followed by a Quizizz with sentence scrambles using the text – now that’s a decent sequence of instruction.

It would just be nice to not have to write all the texts!

 

Here’s my tweet and the suggestions.  The first response offers what is clearing the best one so far, but still isn’t what I’m looking for….