In 1908, a schoolteacher named Lewis Hine embarked on a journey to change the world. His goal? To abolish child labor. His sponsors? The National Child Labor Committee (NCLC), a small organization founded in 1904 to "promote the rights, awareness, dignity, well-being and education of children and youth as they relate to work and working." Through the dedicated efforts of Hine and others, the NCLC made a difference for children everywhere.

Many of us have heard bits and pieces of the story, but even as adults we've seldom analyzed the turn-of-the-century circumstances surrounding the issue of child labor. Nor have we investigated the primary sources of information that exist—Hine's pictures, for example, news clippings from the era, and even stories written by those close to the issue. As a CASE files lesson sampler, A Long Time Ago provides a means for investigating and analyzing 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. Find out more about CASE: Context Analysis Source Explorations and the instructional supplements provided free by LearningLeads™ to assist in teaching students to analyze and create meaning from primary and secondary source materials.

Incorporating graphic organizers and questioning answering strategies that result in reading comprehension improvement while addressing historical thinking and primary source analysis

As with other sources we might investigate, there are many opportunities for learning that transcend the boundaries of history. For our instructional purposes, the special collection of scrapbooks, stories, and photographs collected by Hine and the NCLC provide an excellent opportunity to explore stories (main idea, features, characters, setting, and author purpose and opinion) in context (in this case, a realistic setting of importance both historically and socially). The procedures employed in the CASE lesson sampler A Long Time Go utilize a few of the potential ways we can help students simultaneously "read to learn" and "learn to read," including a research-based instructional approach employing graphic organizers and question answering techniques. Through the use of comprehension monitoring strategies and guided practice, students are encouraged to develop the ability to select and employ their own strategies for improving comprehension.

Find out more about research supporting the mutual teaching and learning benefits of historical source analysis and reading comprehension in the article Reading Comprehension and Historical Thinking: Classroom Realities in Building a Context Connection.

Go to the overview page of the LearningLeads™ Curriculum and Learning Strand: Reading Comprehension for additional material related to teaching and learning reading comprehension. For related infornation on the use of question answering, comprehension monitoring, and graphic organizers and maps to promote reading comprehension, only through analysis of story structure rather than historical sources, see Improving Reading Comprehension: Putting Story Structure Instruction to Work for Student Learning, or see Learning Story Structure for a complete step-by-step procedural teacher guide and ready-to-use student handouts for story structure instruction that can be used with a variety of stories. With purchase of the unit, you'll also get additional background material on question answering and graphic organizers for main idea and story mapping, and a number of assessment tools you can use to track students' progress.

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.