Archive for September 27, 2013

Salt: A Story of Friendship in a Time of War

Written by Helen Frost

Buy on Amazon

This novel in verse, written by the Printz Honor Book author, Helen Frost, once again brings a story to life by her use of the two voices of teens.

One is the son of a settler living just outside the fort and running the trading post. The other is the son of a Native Miami tribe living just miles away. The story is set in 1812 during the westward expansion.

She uses Salt to weave the story together in many beautiful ways. As salt comes from the earth and is needed by animals, Native Americans and settlers alike.

The two young boys are friends, until miscommunication causes them to doubt one another’s intentions. It is skillfully written to allow the reader to discover how easily miscommunications can come about and cause a serious rift in a friendship or an escalation in war.

Fifth grade readers plus older readers will enjoy this story and it would lend itself well to a reader’s theater in English, History or Social Studies classes. There are many areas of the common core that this book will fulfill and enhance. Literacy skills included, besides others, are inferential details, parts to whole, comprehension and cause and effect.

It would also provide for some strong writing activities dealing with; which side would you be on? What parallels to this do we see in today’s world? How can some people see so clearly what others cannot?

For a more contemporary experience with the novel in verse using two voices, see Hidden by this same author.

  • SaltTitle: Salt: A Story of Friendship in a Time of War
  • Author: Helen Frost
  • Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux
  • Reviewer: Elizabeth Swartz
  • Format: Hardcover, 129 pages
  • ISBN:  978-0-374-36387-1
  • Genre: Historical Fiction in Verse

Navigating Early

Written by Clare Vanderpool

Buy on Amazon

When Jackie’s mother dies unexpectedly, the father he barely knows comes from active Navy duty to take him from Kansas to a boarding school in Maine. Not surprisingly, he has a difficult time adjusting and befriends a most unlikely student. They both have the pain of loss in their backgrounds and the love of adventure in their veins.

This Newberry winning author of Moon Over Manifest, has put together another exciting adventure that fifth grade readers as well as sixth and seventh grade readers will enjoy whether they are male or female.

She uses the boys’ knowledge of the outdoors and particularly of the stars to guide them along their way. While one boy shows signs of being autistic, it is an underlying awareness that comes to the reader, and not an, in your face description. He sees things differently, but he is still understandable to the others around him once they stop and consider what he is saying. It provides a good lesson for us all to stop and seriously consider what people are actually saying when they are talking to us.

Literacy skills enhanced by this book include: comprehension, cause and effect, setting, character development and plot. As a read aloud, it could be effective when studying about autism, the outdoors, dealing with death and separating fact from fiction.

Even though this is a fiction book, Clare has done a great deal of research to make sure the setting, and time period are correct. It is told with a great deal of action and excitement that are sure to keep the reader turning pages late into the night.

  • Navigating EarlyTitle: Navigating Early
  • Author: Clare Vanderpool
  • Publisher: Delacorte Press, 2013
  • Reviewer: Elizabeth Swartz
  • Format: Hardcover, 300 pages
  • ISBN:  978-0-385-74209-2
  • Genre: Fiction, Adventure
  • Lexile: 790

Women of the Frontier: 16 Tales of trailblazing Homesteaders, Entrepreneurs, and Rabble-Rousers

Written by Brandon Marie Miller

Buy on Amazon

It’s unusual for such a heavily researched and annotated work as this to be so exciting. The author chose the stories of women with a lot to tell, and she makes the reader care. The author also categorizes stories that defy category.

Not surprisingly, the stories begin with the trek west. The reader learns about Margaret Reed, a member and survivor of the ill-fated Donner party. The ordeal is real without being overly graphic. Amelia Stewart Knight was another early settler who faced unbelievable hardship – along the Oregon Trail. The next three women – Narcissa Whitman, Miriam Davis Colt, and Frances Grummond – faced unusual challenges establishing households on the frontier. Narcissa set out to be a missionary to Native Americans in Oregon. She was killed without converting a single “heathen.” Miriam wrote a book about her failed colony in Kansas. Frances married an army office and found new meanings for isolation and deprivation.

Many women in the West learned to make their own way. Luzena Stanley Wilson went west with the Gold Rush and made a living feeding or housing the men. Clara Brown was a laundress/entrepreneur/philanthropist. Bethenia Owens-Adair was a healer and physician.

Not everyone spent all their time with mere survival. Martha Dartt Maxwell became a taxidermist and introduced western animals to the East. Charlotte “Lotta” Crabtree was a baby-faced, famous singer.

Many women considered the future of the West. Mary Elizabeth Lease immersed herself in the populist movement. Carry Nation fought for temperance and women’s suffrage.

In the category of culture clash, Rachel Parker Plummer and Cynthia Ann Parker are examples of white women held captive by Native Americans. Sarah Winnemucca and Susette La Flesche were Native Americans who fought for their native people.

This work is great as a referential beginning point for a fifth grade unit of the American West or Native Americans. Many of these women wrote about their lives, so reading activities naturally flow into learning more about them and the topics they wrote about. The author includes a table of contents, notes, resources, an index, and numerous photos.

  • Women of the FrontierTITLE: Women of the Frontier: 16 Tales of trailblazing Homesteaders, Entrepreneurs, and Rabble-Rousers
  • AUTHOR: Brandon Marie Miller
  • PUBLISHER: Chicago Review Press
  • REVIEWER: Sue Poduska
  • EDITION: 2013
  • ISBN: 978-1-883052-97-3
  • GENRE: Hard cover, Women, American West, History
  • LEXILE: NA

 

Apache Chief Geronimo

Written by William R. Sanford

Buy on Amazon

They called the young warrior “Geronimo.” He would become known for his relentless raids, his numerous escapes from capture, and his resistance to white settler intrusion during westward expansion.

Part of the “Native American Chiefs and Warriors” series, this book examines the life of the legendary Apache Chief Geronimo. Born Go Khla Yeh (One Who Yawns), he grew up in the harsh desert lands of the southwest and belonged to a band of Apaches called the Bedonkohe, known for their hunting and survival skills. They continually battled against the Mexicans, and it was, in fact, Mexican soldiers that bestowed him the nickname “Geronimo.”

Tragedy would strike early in his life when a massacre killed his wife and young children. He vowed to seek revenge for their deaths and gained a reputation as a fierce warrior. Sometimes he would be captured, but he knew how to escape. He was a wanted man, spending most of his life on the run. When Geronimo’s people were forced onto reservations in different parts of the country, he fought for their return to their homeland. It was only after his death in 1909 when some Apache could finally go back to the southwest.

This book would be a great addition to a classroom library or media center, especially for fifth grade students studying biographies or Native American history. Sanford uses Geronimo’s own words and other written accounts to create authenticity. Archival photographs, illustrations, and maps support text complexity while adding interest to the straightforward narrative. Short chapters with simple sentence structures make this book accessible to all fifth grade readers, including reluctant ones. The glossary, index, and extra reading/web resources could also be used for literacy activities. More titles in this series can be found on the publisher’s website: www.enslow.com.

  • GeronimoTitle: Apache Chief Geronimo
  • Author: William R. Sanford
  • Publisher: Enslow Publishers, Inc.
  • Reviewer: Lauren Abbey Greenberg
  • Format: Paperback, 48 pages
  • ISBN: 978-1-4644-0253-1
  • Genre: Non-Fiction / Biography / History
  • Lexile: 570

Hero on a Bicycle

Written by Shirley Hughes

Buy on Amazon

Thirteen year old Paolo is the hero on a bicycle, but the book is not just about him. The setting is the city of Florence, Italy (1943-1944), but the scope of the story is of life in war-torn Europe and the daily heroism of people trying to maintain a semblance of normality in very difficult times.

Rosemary is a Britisher married to Florentine Franco Crivelli, whose anti-Fascist leanings make it dangerous for him to stay at home. He disappears, nobody knows where. Rosemary is left to manage life in Nazi-occupied Florence: the daily food supplies, the sense of danger around every street corner, and the frustrations of her increasingly isolated teenagers.

Paolo is restless. Constanza is caught in a double bind: she knows Paolo rides out every night, understands his need for that freedom, and will not snitch to their mom. However, she has her own longings which she cannot share because Mom’s burden is heavy enough. Her outlet is playing old records over and over again. Rosemary, aware of their thoughts “reflected grimly on the old cliché that wartime, when not terrifying, was a combination of long stretches of boredom and grinding hardship.”

Into this mix is thrown the Partisan fervor and the foreboding German presence. The author says in an interview (http://www.heroonabicycle.co.uk/p/plot.html) that it is a “straightforward thriller”, but to today’s reader it is not just a thriller, but also a story about the essential goodness of all people. Rosemary performs dangerous work with the Partisans to give shelter to Allied soldiers. Helmut Grass, the German officer discovers that the Crivelli family is hiding an escaped Allied prisoner of war (he finds a part of a cigarette pack which shows the words Lucky Strike, an American brand), but does not disclose that information to his commanding officer. Constanza thinks, “It was difficult to think of him as The Enemy, someone against whom she and her family were about to pit all their courage and humanity.”  Hilaria’s family benefits from their Fascist sympathies, but she warns her friend Constanza that Rosemary was on some kind of Gestapo list. Il Volpe, the Partisan leader, stops for a brief moment to acknowledge Paolo’s presence, even as he escaping from the German firing squad. In big ways and small, people demonstrate their basic humanity.

Teachers and librarians should start with the “thriller” element of the story, and then create reading activities and discussions about that bygone era. There is much that can be learned from the book.

  • HeroTitle: Hero on a Bicycle
  • Author: Shirley Hughes
  • Publisher: Candlewick Press
  • Reviewer: Anjali Amit
  • Hardback:   213 pages
  • ISBN: 978-0-7636-6037-6
  • Genre: Novel

Lincoln’s Grave Robbers

Written by Steve Sheinkin

Buy on Amazon

This true crime thriller will amaze fifth grade readers interested in American history. It tells about the conspirators as they plan how to steal Lincoln’s body out from under the Lincoln monument in Springfield, Illinois, as well as when and why they would even try such a thing.

On the other side of the story are the Secret Service agents following their trail but wanting to catch them in the act rather than just prevent the theft. They have placed an undercover double agent in the middle of the works that causes the tension to rise as readers expect him to get caught many different times.

These are the very earliest days of the Secret Service and readers will be interested to read how much of their decision making in catching criminals was left up to each individual detective.

Beside the main crime at hand, these conspirators are also involved with counterfeiting plates of American currency. When one of their main leaders gets sent to prison the rest first try to think of a way to get him out; then devise a plan for keeping up the counterfeiting ring without him.

As a diversion, they plan the theft for election night of 1876 to be sure all the neighbors are off the roads and in town.

Several different literacy skills can be strengthened by use of this book including, reading for details, sequencing, comprehension, vocabulary, context clues, plot and cause and effect.

Boys and girls in the third grade and beyond would benefit from having this book read aloud or assigned in a book club setting where it can be discussed and enjoyed with others.

The story is smoothly written and moves the plot along at a brisk pace keeping young readers interested. It contains several photographs from the time as well as diagrams of the Lincoln Monument and maps of the surrounding grounds to help readers get drawn into the tale.

Author information: This book is written by the same author that wrote the nonfiction Newberry Honor Book, BOMB. BOMB also received the 2013 Robert F. Sibert Informational Book Medal.  http://www.ala.org/alsc/awardsgrants/bookmedia/sibertmedal

Extras: Glossary, Source Notes, Index, Authenic Photos from the Library of Congress and the Lincoln Monument Site, maps of the site and diagrams of the Lincoln Monument in Springfield, Illinois.

  • Grave RobbersTitle: Lincoln’s Grave Robbers
  • Author:  Steve Sheinkin
  • Publisher: Scholastic, NY, January 1, 2013.
  • Reviewer: Elizabeth Swartz
  • Format: Hardcover/ 207 p
  • ISBN:  978-0-545-40572-0
  • Genre: American History 1875, true crime thriller
  • Lexile: 930

 

Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Written by Abraham Lincoln

Illustrated by James Daugherty

Buy on Amazon

Four score and seven years ago……..Do you know the rest?  The Gettysburg Address is probably one of the most famous speeches made in history.  Everyone is at least familiar with some of it or the president who spoke it.  In 1863, President Abraham Lincoln stood under a November wintery sky and delivered a two minute speech that changed history.   James Daugherty has created wonderful pictorial interpretation of this infamous speech.   Each page contains a part of that speech with  an interpretation of that particular part of the speech.   Students with higher reading skills will be the target for this book, while the illustrations will appeal to many others.

I remember having to memorize this speech in 5th grade. Oh what a joy it would have been to have a book such as this in which to do the memorizing.  The illustrations bring the book to life, capturing the events in bright, bold colors.  The illustrations also help the reader with comprehension.   After the speech is finished the author has added descriptions of his paintings and his interpretation.  This book would be a wonderful tool in teaching the Gettysburg Address.

Along with the speech itself, there is a bit of added history from Daugherty.  President Lincoln was not informed until just a few days prior, that he would be speaking at all.  It is rather remarkable that Lincoln felt his speech was a “flat failure”, yet here we are 100+ years later and it is still remembered as a turning point in our progress as a nation.  The most poignant line that we as a nation should strive for is still as relevant today as it was back then – “a government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the Earth”.

  • Gettysburg AddressTITLE: Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
  • AUTHOR:  Abraham Lincoln
  • ILLUSTRATION: James Daugherty
  • PUBLISHER: Albert Whitman and Company
  • REVIEWER: Cheri Liddy
  • ISBN: 978-0-8075-4550-8
  • GENRE: History