Lincoln And Amelia Earhart Summary

Elementary teachers are often taught and encouraged to use trade books as the center of a unit. Using this method gives teachers an almost unlimited amount of resources to choose from, there are hundreds of trade books on hundreds on topics across all grade and reading levels. Although this may seem like a brilliant idea at first, there is currently a growing awareness of the truthfulness and misrepresentations within these trade books. They are all different containing different amounts and types of information, so how do we know what is really true or most important? Elementary teachers are required to use multiple informational for this reason, such as primary documents along with the trade books. In this article, the authors examine Abraham Lincoln and Amelia Earhart due to both of them being popular topics within the elementary curricula. Multiple trade books at the elementary level were chosen to be examined on each topic. All books were reviewed and the potential areas of historical representation and misrepresentations were noted. From there, sets of questions for each topic were formed. By referring back to these questions, similarities, differences, and patterns between the trade books within the same topic could be recognized.
This can be seen as a good thing, because as a genre, non-fiction books often intend to achieve historicity and minimize historical misrepresentation. Unlike Earhart’s books, which mainly focused on her and no other individuals, Lincoln’s books significantly included a variety of people. Although the Lincoln books did represent him in a proper way, the brutality of slavery was minimized. In Earhart’s books, one important detail was left out, her female competitors. As the article continues, various lesson ideas are mentioned involving Earhart and Lincoln that could be applied within classrooms of all ages to get the “full”