Civil War Stories: An Integrative Approach to Developing Perspective
reating personal connections to C history i s a struggle for many educators. We want to engage our students, hut not at the expense of sacrificing content. We want to integrate the curriculum, finding concepts and content that complement each other; the f i t needs to he a natural one. When teachers select literature with prominent voices of history, students begin to add perspective to their historical understanding and voices to their writing. In the Civil War uni t that we describe i n this article, seventh and eighth grade students apply language arts skills to social studies activities while they gain a richer understanding of the Civil War. The activities, when used together, form a model for the development of perspective, which cnkibles students to interpret and remember history by examining the voices of the past. One of the primary goals of the unit was to have students with a limited Civil War history background assume a personal perspective of the reality of any war and especially of a civil war. After