In this article, the authors offer a selection of strategies that teachers can regularly use to help students tame the difficulties they often encounter with social studies texts for the middle grades. They have taken a thematic approach to the strategies, basing all of them on the topic of Civil War. Furthermore, because the authors are convinced that a variety of print resources is essential in social studies classrooms, the authors suggest ideas for helping students work not only with their textbooks but also related fiction, narrative text, and expository or informational trade books. The sampler of strategies empowers students at each stage of the reading process--before, during, and after. One strategy teachers can use to help students understand informational material is the "structured overview" (Barron 1978), also called an "advance organizer." With this visual outline, the teacher presents, in hierarchical fashion, important information from a chapter or other segment of text. Before introducing a new topic or chapter to students, the teacher reviews the material and determines the most important concepts and related subordinate information. Those ideas are then arranged in graphic form, using connecting lines between categories to illustrate their relationships. (Contains 10 figures.)