While social studies educators suggest that social studies instruction can and should be taught both through literacy-integrated delivery as well as independently from other subjects, many elementary classroom teachers often find that school expectations or district mandates leave little instructional time for any subject that is not specifically assessed on end-of-the year assessments. Current standards highlight the importance of a shared focus of social studies and language arts. The language of the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) describes social studies standards as being "integrated" into the English Language Arts standards. The C3 Framework for Social Studies Standards affirms this connection, noting that social studies teachers are asked "to share the responsibilities for literacy instruction in K-12 education...The C3 Framework fully incorporates and extends the expectations for literacy learning put forward in the Common Core Standards for ELA/Literacy." What the study of social studies provides to typical literacy instruction is wide- ranging and diverse. Specific to elementary literacy, one of the most important reasons to include social studies instruction is the introduction it provides to primary sources. Primary sources are often complex and challenging, meeting the emphasis of the CCSS, as well as the C3's Framework's focus on inquiry through primary sources. In addition to providing an authentic reason to focus on the complex text of primary sources (even without a specific focus on social studies instruction), the text formats that are available to elementary teachers (as literacy resources) are frequently limited to narrative historical formats. Numerous core reading programs provide texts that are nonfiction accounts of true historical events. Researchers have hypothesized that students' overexposure to narrative text formats (and underexposure to expository formats) may contribute to declining achievement scores in later elementary and middle school years. Social studies, with all of its sub-disciplines, offers texts that are rich with a wealth of varying text formats such as problem/solution or cause/effect, as well as a variety of text features such as charts, graphs, and maps that are critical not only for school-aged students to understand, but for adults as well. The article describes four concrete ways for teachers to extend literacy and test-preparation materials that are frequently a part of classroom instruction in the elementary grades by integrating additional instruction focused on the social studies.