In 1908, a schoolteacher named Lewis Hine embarked on a journey to abolish child labor. Along with his sponsor, the National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), it made a difference for children everywhere. Yet, even as adults we've seldom analyzed the turn-of-the-century circumstances surrounding the issue of child labor. Likewise, few students have had the opportunity to study the primary sources of information that exist—Hine's pictures, for example, and stories written by those close to the issue.

Sources in the form of stories, such as Mr. Coal's Story, provide an excellent opportunity to explore stories (main idea, features, characters, setting, and author purpose and opinion) in context. Therefore, they provide a means to help students learn about realistic settings of importance both historically and socially while simultaneously improving their reading comprehension skills. The key is in the strategies employed.

How do we, in tandem, employ research-based strategies that help students to "read to learn" and "learn to read?"

Explore the resources below as we investigate this question in the context of historical sources.

Check out the CASE lesson sampler A Long Time Ago. Employ proven reading comprehension strategies such as graphic organizers, question answering, and comprehension monitoring while helping students learn to think historically—to investigate and analyze actual primary sources in order to gain an understanding of the child labor issue as it existed in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Read about the strong connections between reading comprehension and analyzing primary source texts in the article Reading Comprehension and Historical Thinking: Classroom Realities in Building a Context Connection.

Find out about the use of stories as prompts, encouraging student dialogue and question generation, strategies proven to promote further investigation and domain-specific learning as well as improvement in reading comprehension. See The Eliciting Prompt and Questioning and the Generative Student Investigation.

Find out more about CASE: Context Analysis Source Explorations and get a variety of accompanying instructional supplements for teaching students to analyze and create meaning from primary and secondary source materials while developing other important learning skills.

If this is your first time to visit LearningLeads™, or if it has been awhile, be sure to take a look at the LearningLeads™ homepage and the Learning Through Context curriculum and learning strand overview page while you are here.