Dear Reader,

I think I can almost always tell when a middle grade or young adult book is written by a teacher.

Their audience is not tweens and teens — it's their students. They don't want to just give their students a fun, meaningful story. They want the plot, characters, and setting to be infused with the academic concepts their students are learning.

On the surface, Glitch is a time-travel adventure novel. That makes for an enticing hook for students. But as you get deeper into the story, it's clear that it's also a social studies resource. There are both descriptions of historical events and contemplations of essential questions, such as "Whose perspectives are included? Whose are excluded?"

It means two-for-one learning. Students practice their reading comprehension and analysis while growing their historical background knowledge. If you want more two-for-one books, be sure to check out the Resource of the Week below.

Today's Book Recommendation

Title: Glitch​

Author: Laura Martin

Genre: SciFi, Time Travel

Age Range: 11+

Summary: Regan and Elliot are students at the Academy: a secret and elite time-traveling organization. Though they're both training to become Glitchers, time-travelers who preserve history, they don't get along. At all. But then they receive a letter from the future and they're forced to overcome their differences — or let the world as they know it perish.

Teaching with Glitch

Recommend this book to students who liked:

• ​Invictus by Ryan Graudin (time-traveling escapades that make readers think deeply about cause and effect)
• ​Keeper of the Lost Cities by Shannon Messenger (young teens navigating relationships while also traveling between worlds to save the day)
• ​Renegades by Marissa Meyer (enemies who reluctantly become friends in order to save the world)

Read it for these themes:

Historical cause and effect: Time-travel hypotheticals are a fun way to track how one historical event leads to another and another. Regan and Elliot's adventures show the value of preserving even the messiest portions of history — as long as we learn from them.

Learning abilities: Elliot is a planner who easily retains everything he reads, sees, and hears. Regan is intuitive, able to observe details and spot patterns. But each intellectual strength comes with a weakness, and they must learn to differentiate their own learning.

My two cents: This book is highly entertaining. It has a great time-travel plot that does not become overly complicated and a fun cast of characters who develop in meaningful ways. It left me thinking about how our current events will one day be historical events: what will we learn and what will we do differently?

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Resource of the Week

Want more books that belong in a social studies classroom? Download our (free) BINGO board and challenge students to study social studies through literature.

Check it out ⇗

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Have a good one and learn everything you can,

Hannah

PS: Who is your favorite teacher author?