It’s the beginning of the school year and you’re being pulled in a million different directions. Your days are full to the brim as you get to know new students and their families, plan curriculum with colleagues, and consider the most effective teaching strategies and cutting-edge resources.

This school year we will be shifting the focus of our column to strategies for integrating curriculum content, Common Core State Standards [CCSS], content standards, and literature. What role can inquiry play? How can we harness an inquiry-based approach to teaching and learning as a tool for integrating curriculum? And, what role does literature play in this curriculum?

We’ll be putting these various pieces together, a job that we believe is crucial, yet still largely incomplete. We’ll provide you with snapshots of what inquiry and integration look like when you and your students are studying topics in science, math, and social studies at the primary, intermediate, and high school levels—models and ideas that you can expand and adjust to make your own.

Moving towards inquiry and integration raises a number of questions for us. When we integrate reading, writing, listening, and speaking in meaningful ways, we are meeting many of the expectations of the Common Core standards. But what does using children’s and young adult literature across the curriculum require in an era of the CCSS? How do we teach for depth while also incorporating the standards? Standards are not synonymous with curriculum. Authentic learning can only take place in the context of rich curriculum; it’s about encountering big ideas, raising and answering questions, and making sense of evidence. This is not done in a vacuum, but in the context of the study of science, math, history, literature, and the world around us.

Small Steps, Large Possibilities

We can begin the integration process by taking small steps that have large possibilities for further development. Both of us have used small sets of related books many times over the course of our teaching careers. We’ve referred to them as powerful pairs, triplets, and quads and text sets. Others have labeled sets of related books as clusters. The name is not as important as the idea that even a small group of carefully chosen books can jump-start a meaningful investigation.

Here’s an example of what we mean. In our upcoming columns, you will see the following template. This will be a springboard for ways in which you can frame an integrated unit that utilizes reading, writing, listening, and speaking as a tool for accessing content, and employs quality children’s and young adult literature of all genres to frame inquiry within a disciplinary lens. One month we might consider a sample unit for primary-grade science, another month a unit for high school social studies.

We look forward to journeying with you through this school year, throughout the content areas and up and down the K-12 grade span. In the context of your busy teaching lives, we hope that these curriculum snapshots will help teachers and school librarians to work and plan together to immerse students in investigations that matter.

Moderator Mary Ann Cappiello leads the author panel “Nonfiction at the Forefront of the Common Core,” at the School Library Journal Leadership Summit.

Among other mandates, the Common Core State Standards (CC) require students to “gather relevant information from multiple print and digital sources” and “assess the credibility and accuracy of each source.”

At the School Library Journal Leadership Summit held October 26-27, four authors of children’s nonfiction—Deborah Hopkinson, Barbara Kerley, Steve Sheinkin, and Sally M. Walker—came together to share their views on what they do, how it relates to these requirements, and how they, as authors, address CC principles while conducting research for their books.

Moderator Mary Ann Cappiello of Lesley University led the author panel, “Nonfiction at the Forefront of the Common Core,” an October 26 discussion about the development of content, the use of primary and secondary sources, the balance of perspective, and writing style as it relates to the standards.

Authors from the Nonfiction panel sign books for attendees.

The authors opened by discussing the content of their books as it relates to current events, from the U.S. election to a dysfunctional Congress to the possibility of Iran developing nuclear weapons. Sheinkin discussed the relevance that his book Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon (Roaring Brook, 2012), a National Book Award finalist, has for today’s kids regarding the specter of Iran’s developing nuclear weapons. Barbara Kerley noted that her book, Those Rebels, John & Tom (Scholastic, 2012), which focuses on the relationship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, shows that although Congress has often disagreed, historically, it can still function for the good of the people.

Sheinkin characterized his research as “nerdy detective work,” while Kerley said that her exploration of primary resources made her characters come alive. Who knew that John Adams was a “foodie”, or that Thomas Jefferson was a shopaholic?

Kerley also addressed how she and the book’s illustrator, Edwin Fotheringham, worked to present a balanced perspective—an issue relating to CC’s mandate that students  “assess how point of view… shapes the content and style of a text.” Fotheringham revealed Adams and Jefferson’s differences visually: Jefferson is shown as well dressed, while Adams wears tattered clothes, and the two men are portrayed standing back-to-back to emphasize that they disagreed. Kerley showed how the men differed through straightforward description, such as, “John liked to talk” and “Tom was shy, and dreaded speaking in front of crowds.”

Walker, author of Their Skeletons Speak: Kennewick Man and the Paleoamerican World (Carolrhoda, 2012) explained that her research revealed conflicting archaeological conclusions as to whether a spear wound caused the death of a man, based on 9,000-year-old remains. Newer technology and research indicated that he recovered from the wound, while older research findings differed.

Authors Deborah Hopkinson and Barbara Kerley display their books.

Hopkinson, author of Annie and Helen (Schwartz & Wade, 2012), about Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan, used Sullivan’s letters as a primary source of her research. However, it was her choice of verse to tell Sullivan and Keller’s story that participants honed in on in relation to the Common Core. The Craft and Structure specifications of CC ask students to “interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning or tone.”  Hopkinson’s reason for choosing verse? “I live in language,” she said.  “Read like a writer and write and a reader.”

After the presentation, summit attendees were encouraged to become more savvy regarding the Common Core. Krista Brakhage, a media specialist at Poudre High School in Fort Collins, CO, tweeted afterward:  “Note to self: Buy more non-fiction historical/scientific picture books for my high school ELA students.”

Walker had a message to relay to student researchers: “Librarians are your new best friends.”