Teachers often have students read historical fiction as part of units of study in social studies.  For many students, historical fiction can be an engaging entry point into distant history.  It can also pose challenges.  Frequently, students are confused by what is truth and what is fiction.  Additionally, many struggle to use visualization, an important comprehension strategy, when reading about the distant past. 

When we read historical fiction with our students to learn about history, Myra Zarnowski suggests four basic questions that can be used to guide student thinking:

1. How does this book help me to understand daily life in the past?

2. Could the events described have happened? How do I know?

3. Which events really happened? How do I know?

4. Which characters really existed? How do I know?

 The common challenge faced by many young students in beginning this work is the lack of prior knowledge of the topic or era.  In order to build needed prior knowledge, we used primary documents, informational texts and museum collections to assist children in understanding and critically reading Phoebe the Spy and New York City during the Revolutionary War. 

Claire Moore, a museum educator at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, led us in an exercise in which we studied excerpts of Phoebe the Spy that described setting. We then visited a colonial house in the museum's collectin to examine artifacts that might have been similar to those that Phoebe encountered. A sample excerpt and the worksheet Claire devised are attached.  

Teachers also spent time completing a three column chart, titled Fact/Fiction/I'm Not Sure to separate out the fact from the fiction as they read Phoebe.  Although most teachers had read the book frequently, this exercise caused them to read with a new purpose and they found many pieces of "information" that they had overlooked before.  Using their questions and a set of primary and secondary sources, they created a question-answer book as described in Making Sense of History to reflect new learnings.  Instructions and templates are attached.