From MeL: Using MeL for Country Reports

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From Sonya Norris at Michigan electronic Library:

Do you have students asking for resources to write country reports? MeL has several student-friendly resources for this oft-requested topic.

Britannica and World Book both will allow you to compare basic facts and figures about countries but Britannica is definitely more full-throated when it comes to articles. They do a great job with articles at scalable reading levels including images and video to augment the text that is freely available for students to include in their reports with attribution.

Kids InfoBits is geared for preK-5 and while they don’t do side-by-side country comparisons or list every country recognized by the UN, they do have in-depth data on approximately 90 countries. They have resources from many sources that they break down into books, biographies, pictures, magazines and news. For Brazil, for example, they have over 500 news articles beginning at middle school reading levels as well as dozens of book excerpts and six brief historical biographies.

Gale’s Research in Context for middle schoolers is light on geography. If you don’t think they’ll feel “talked down” to, feel free to steer middle schoolers to Kids InfoBits for country information if they’re looking for it, they’ll find plenty at their reading level.

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