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Our Favorite Strategies for Historical Fiction Read-Alouds

Our Favorite Strategies for Historical Fiction Read-Alouds

What’s your favorite genre to read? For me, especially as an adult, it’s historical fiction. However, while I also love a good historical fiction read-aloud, I recognize that my kids relate to this genre better when I take a few steps to help them bridge the distance between their own experience and the time and place of the book. 

Some of these are techniques we’ve incorporated on our Read-Aloud Posters and can easily be adapted for non-poster books, while others are off-poster activities that I find to be particularly helpful with historical fiction books.

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Read-Aloud Poster Spotlight: Number the Stars

Read-Aloud Poster Spotlight: Number the Stars

Published in 1989, Number the Stars by Lois Lowry is a Newbery-award winning historical fiction middle-grade novel. While you may remember it as a favorite from your own childhood, if you’ve never read it before, it’s a story you’ll enjoy hearing for the first time as you read it with your family.

Our Read-Aloud Poster for this book includes activities that will help your family understand the story itself as well as appreciate the historical and geographical context of the book. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at the poster activities.

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Read-Aloud Poster Spotlight: The Secret Garden

Read-Aloud Poster Spotlight: The Secret Garden Like all our Read-Aloud Posters, our poster for The Secret Garden balances novel and familiar activities within the unique context of this particular book. Our Poster Spotlight looks at the novel activities first (those that will likely be new to even seasoned Read-Aloud Poster users) and then look at the familiar activities (we’ve used some variation of the activity of previous posters). After all - if this is your very first poster, it’s all new to you!

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