With the Common Core, there is an emphasis on nonfiction texts and on primary source documents. The Library of Congress must have been keeping this in mind when they introduced Student Discovery Sets earlier this year. Students can load the documents onto their tablets and then use the interactive tools to zoom in, draw on, or highlight details. Each of the sets have teaching resources!
Here is the text from an email from the Library of Congress introducing the texts:
As the new school year begins, the Library of Congress invites students
everywhere to touch, draw on and explore some of its most valuable
treasures—all via a new set of free interactive ebooks for tablets.
The new Library of Congress
Student Discovery Sets bring together historical artifacts and one-of-a-kind
documents on a wide range of topics, from history to science to literature.
Interactive tools let students zoom in for close examination, draw to highlight
interesting details and make notes about what they discover.
The first six Student
Discovery Sets are available now for the iPad, and can be downloaded for free
on iBooks. These sets cover the U.S. Constitution, Symbols of the United
States, Immigration, the Dust Bowl, the Harlem Renaissance, and Understanding
the Cosmos.
With a swipe of a finger,
learners can peer into the workshop where the Statue of Liberty was built, scrutinize
George Washington’s notes on the Constitution, and zoom in on the faces of new
arrivals at Ellis Island. Using the portability that tablets bring, students
can hand their work to a classmate to collaborate.
The objects in the Student
Discovery Sets are primary sources—items created by eyewitnesses to history.
From Galileo’s drawings of the moon to Zora Neale Hurston’s plays to Thomas
Edison’s films, these maps, songs, posters, sheet music and iconic images
immerse students in history, culture and science and give them the power to
explore.
Primary sources have unique
instructional power, says the Library’s director of Educational Outreach, Lee
Ann Potter. “By analyzing primary sources, students can engage with complex
content, build their critical thinking skills and create new knowledge. The
Library’s new Student Discovery Sets provide rich tools for launching that
process of analysis and discovery.”
The sets are designed for
students, providing easy access to open-ended exploration. A Teacher’s Guide
for each set, with background information, teaching ideas` and additional
resources, is one click away on the Library’s website for teachers, www.loc.gov/teachers/.
The Library of Congress, the
nation’s oldest federal cultural institution and the largest library in the
world, holds more than 158 million items in various languages, disciplines and
formats. The Library serves the U.S. Congress and the nation both on-site in
its reading rooms on Capitol Hill and through its award-winning website at www.loc.gov.
What a cute story this is! I can definitely see my sixth grade graphic novel lovers reading this book. Everything about it is cute, the drawings, the characters, everything.
I was so impressed with this book. Before I read it, I figured there was no way that they would be able to keep the important themes and scenes in the book if they made a manga version with approximately the same number of pages as the original. I was proven wrong. 
