Next Tuesday my book All the Way to the Top: How One Girl’s Fight for Americans with Disabilities Changed Everything comes out. I’m excited to share with kids and adults the story of how the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) came about. Lucky for me, the brilliant social studies teacher Jenna Pontius Vandenberg volunteered to pull together an educator’s guide for the book.

I’ve done my own educator’s guides before, and it was a good learning experience for me to understand how teachers might approach a text. But when Jenna sent me her educator’s guide for this book, I was completely blown away by the breadth and depth of the suggestions she has for how teachers can engage students.

One nagging problem of writing biography is that, while the book is about an individual, the individual lived in a web of relationships. Jenna addresses that problem with an activity she suggests of having students research other people who were important in getting the ADA passed. And appropriately, since the point is that change happens when groups coalesce around an issue, she sets this up as a group activity.

Another problem of writing about history for kids is connecting it to today’s world. Jenna found great ways to connect the story I tell to their own world. She invites students to analyze a speech Barack Obama gave about the ADA. And she pushes them to think critically with a set of worksheets where students examine a real-life problem and write about how laws like the ADA could solve the problem.

The Common Core linked Educator’s Guide is available for free here on my website and on Sourcebook’s website.

If you think you are going to buy All the Way to the Top, I’d appreciate your pre-ordering it. Pre-orders matter a lot in the publishing world! And I always appreciate people posting reviews on commerce sites and social media.

Finally, if you’re going to be in the Denver metro area next week, come join us at our book launch party at Tattered Cover Aspen Grove on Tuesday, March 10, at 7 PM.

Thanks!

All the Way to the Top: How One Girl’s Fight for Americans with Disabilities Changed Everything by Annette Bay Pimentel, illustrated by Nabi Ali (Sourcebooks: 2020).