Not because I don't like history, but because I need to diversify.
Yesterday's book was Revolutionary John Adams by Cheryl Harness. This book was pretty dense, but I seriously enjoyed it. This information-packed book includes not only fact-rich narrative, but illustrations and quotes and other small details that add on more interest and more information.
The book flows in the typical chronological format and includes pictures and illustrations that help to add more information. For example, when it is describing both John and Abigail caring for their firstborn child, it includes a strip at the top with pictures of John and Abigail and the sentence "John Adams and Abigail Smith were married in her home in Weymouth, Massachusetts" as a caption. At the bottom of the page is a second strip, this time containing an illustration of colonists protesting new taxes, with a pair of captions explaining the pictures. Finally, at the bottom of the page is a quote from Adams describing his feelings about the taxes: "That enormous Engine, fabricated by the british [sic] Parliament for battering down all the Rights and Liberties of America, I mean the Stamp Act, has raised and spread thro the whole Continent, a Spirit that will be recorded to our Honour, with all future Generations."(all spelling errors are part of the original.)
What's tricky about this book is the sentence structure. Each sentence is important, and filled with information, but this makes for very long sentences. For example:
When the French and Indian War came to an end in 1763, young King George III and his Parliament in London decided to keep an army posted in the Colonies to protect British Americans from being attacked by Indians -and to keep the colonists out of the Native Americans' hunting grounds beyond the Appalachian Mountains.
That's a pretty long sentence for elementary school kids, huh? Although I can't find a Fountas and Pinnell reading level (I use this because that's what my school uses for reading levels), I would guess that it's probably an S or T, and therefore a solid fifth grade book. This could definitely be used for read aloud in younger grades, though. If I were using it for a read aloud, I would make sure I offered time after the reading for students to go back and reread and look through the illustrations and quotes. I think that those definitely add something to the book that can't really be captured during read aloud, since a lot of the pictures are pretty small.
The book I read today was Thomas Jefferson A Picture Book Biography, by James Cross Giblin. I didn't like this book as much as the John Adams one. There wasn't nearly as much information, the writing style was pretty bland, and the illustrations weren't very exciting to me. The writer kept going in and out of a semi-theme about how Jefferson was a quiet speaker, but never really did anything with that. Additionally, it talked about his inner debate over slavery, but never really problematized that, or really showed any kind of interest in it. John Adams got into a lot of detail about the rivalry between Jefferson and Adams, and there was none of that in there. In fact, the only interesting detail that the writer alluded to was his possible affair with various slaves. Of course, he never came right out and said it, and I might not even have noticed it if I didn't already know that he had affairs with slaves. I'd probably put this somewhere in my classroom, but I don't know if I would really even read it with the students. I'm sure there's a better Thomas Jefferson biography out there.
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