| An upbeat look at how quilts were actually story boards and maps to freedom for the slaves! Jacqueline Woodson is also originally from upstate SC, so a great way to show how a SC person can be an author! |
This book is about the past presidents, from George Bush to Bill Clinton, it tells their biography is a comical way. It offers facts, and comments said about each president while in office. They tell about all of the perks of being in office, having to do chores, and the downside of being president, scandals, etc.
Let Them Play is a book about a black little league baseball team who were unable to play in the little league world series due to the time they lived in. This book takes place in segregated, SC in 1955. It deals with the happenings of the civil rights also. In this book the boys traveled to play in the world series but were unable to because there were no white teams that would play them. I feel this book is a memoir of Jackie Robinson because he was teh first black to be in the league. The illustrations are beautifully drawn in this book and it depicts exaclty how things happen during that time.
The Watsons Go to Birmingham is a comical story told through the eyes of nine year old Kenny. Kenny’s older brother is becoming and handful so the Watsons decide to take a road trip from Flint, Michigan to Alabama to visit Kenny’s grandmother. Kenny’s grandmother is said to be the one who can straighten his older brother out. This book is set in 1963 during the Civil Rights movement and depicts the trials that African Americans faced at that time. Although it was a rough time, through Kenny’s eyes, a wonderful story is told and a bit of history is released to the reader.
| Georges Melies was a French magician who went into cinema. Young Hugo Cabret helps discover him and his beautiful automaton after Melies has been in hiding for many years. Hugo becomes a magician after Mr. Melies helps him out. |
Nowadays it’s no big deal or a girl to travel seventy-five miles. But when Charlotte May Pierstorff wanted to cross seventy-five miles of Idaho mountains to see her grandma in 1914, it was a very big deal indeed. There was no highway except the railroad, and a train ticket would have cost her parents a full day’s pay. This book tells the exciting adventure of how May was ‘mailed’ to her grandmother’s house.
Two children discover an arrowhead, and a broken china cup wondering what life was life 300 years ago. The author takes you back through the years on that same land before that house was built showing you what life was life and what those people had to go through to get back to where they were in present time.
Harriet Tubman is a woman who talks to God and hears His voice in the whip-poor-will’s song and the owl’s screech, and sees His face in the reflection of the moon on the creek, and in other forms of nature as He directs her away from the inhumane treatment inflicted upon her as a slave at the mercy of a cruel master and toward being the Moses of her people as a conductor in the Underground Railroad. The Underground Railroad consisted of sites that offered safe havens for runaway slaves on their flight to freedom in the North and were operated by abolitionists, people who wanted to legally do away with slavery because they felt that it was inherently wrong.
Prayers and Negro spirituals were important in the lives of the enslaved, as in Harriet’s life. The prayers provided direction and solace and the spirituals contained words which were codes understood only by the oppressed.
When Harriet arrived in Philadelphia, the freedom which had been granted to her through God’s guidance was instrumental in her quest to return to the South and lead her family to the freedom that she now enjoyed. She would make many more treks back to the South and would lead as many as three hundred slaves to freedom.
This powerfully written Caldecott Honor book features some of Harriet Tubman’s possible conversations with God. It also allows the reader to learn of the guiding force that directs one’s life when he or she allows himself or herself to be used in the way that God sees fit. Athough this book is only a fictionalized account of a factual and historical truth, the author’s note at the end provides a brief and accurate biographical sketch of Harriet Tubman’s life.
 This is the story of two Union soldiers, Pinkus Aylee and Sheldon Russell Curtis who befriend each other when Pinkus discovers Sheldon wounded in a field during the Civil War. Pinkus takes Sheldon back to his home, where his mother nurses him back to health. After being discovered by the Confederacy, they are both captured, and Pinkus is hanged. Sheldon lives to pass the story on until eventually Patricia Polacco’s father passes it on her. |
This Eleanor Estes book is a captivating fictional book. A young girl, Wanda Petronski, is the main character. She does not have many friends. The award winning book takes place during a depression when times are hard. Wanda is teased for wearing the same tathered blue dress. Then a special lesson is learned by her class mates when little Wanda moves away.