 Then we added a piece this year. Each year I try and just go a little bit further with what I've learned since 2001 and say, okay, how can I make this be a little bit better? And that's just the strategy that all teachers do is try and once you've tried something, how could this be better the next year? So I went to a conference in Houston at the beginning of the school year, and a lady from the Library of Congress shared with me a thing called Books as Hooks. And so what she did was she took primary sources and showed the kids the primary sources before she read a book to them to get them interested and hooked on it. So that was an interesting concept. So when I came back to my classroom, I decided I was going to try it, but we were working on reading comprehension strategy of inferring at that time. And so I decided to add that piece to it too. So I pulled different primary sources, both documents, photos, and a few artifacts too, and pulled those together and the kids analyzed those and they have different pieces of paper that they do that on. It's mainly looking at who, what, when, where, why something's happening in a photo or in a document or in an artifact. So just thinking of those questioning strategies there, then I pulled that into a document analysis, a photo analysis, an artifact analysis, so that each kid gets to see each of the documents, each of the artifacts. And then from there then they predicted as a small group what they thought that photo was going to have to do with because I didn't tell them what book we were going to be reading or anything about it. I wanted to see what their background knowledge was on it first. So they made some predictions, and after then we predicted then, when I'm reading the story then, I stop at different places and I let the kids make connections or infer with those artifacts have to do with the story or the time period that we're talking about. I think it's the best way that I've ever taught inferring because they completely understand and it's a very easy assessment for me to see who can make the connections and what their inferences are just by what they're saying. I've also found that kids that maybe had a difficult time doing it, once they've heard another student made a connection, they're like, oh, I've got something else I could add to that or I could add on to that. And so just being able to talk those things out, it's made other kids who are more quiet and reserved be able to then share during that time too. So it's been a very successful project.