Bartography

Money can’t buy everything, it’s true, but it’s nonetheless been on the minds of 8-year-old S and 3-year-old F lately. S’s interest owes equally to a money-management kit that his accountant uncle gave him for his birthday and to his newfound love of all things Yomega. F just likes repeatedly filling and emptying whatever is serving as his piggybank in any given week.

Given all that, what better theme for our U.S. history reading this month than money? Here’s what we’ve amassed for March:

• The Story of Money by Betsy Maestro and illustrated by Giulio Maestro. Come for the currency, stay for the overview of how civilization in general has evolved.
• Money, Money, Money: The Meaning of the Art and Symbols on United States Paper Currency by Nancy Winslow Parker. Somewhat outdated now that the currency has been redesigned, but interesting just the same. You’d probably forgotten that Grover Cleveland is on the $1,000 bill.
• The Long March: The Choctaw’s Gift to Irish Famine Relief by Marie-Louise Fitzpatrick. This is a beautiful, heartbreaking tale of how generosity can spring even from poverty.
• Henry Hikes to Fitchburg by D. B. Johnson. Based on F’s reaction to this wonderful introduction to Thoreau — and his preference for walking over working to earn train fare — we’ll be reading the next three in the series in no time.
• Vision of Beauty: The Story of Sarah Breedlove Walker by Kathryn Lasky and illustrated by Nneka Bennett. I was looking for a good rags-to-riches picture book biography, and I found one.
• The Buffalo Nickel by Taylor Morrison. Huge animals and complicated machinery (of the coinmaking variety)!
• Leah’s Pony by Elizabeth Friedrich and illustrated by Michael Garland. Terrific story, and a nifty introduction to the Dust Bowl and the Depression.
• Follow the Money! by Loreen Leedy. The everyday history of a single quarter named George.

As always, I’d love to hear your suggestions for titles I overlooked. This month in particular, the topic has so many fascinating facets that I’m sure I missed some. So, please, put in your two cents worth.

I’m adding one more title to this month’s reading list: astronaut Gene Cernan’s memoir, The Last Man on the Moon.

Why this adult title* for my two boys? Because on our Thursday night visit to Space Center Houston, Cernan was there. 8-year-old S got to ask him what liftoff felt like, and 3-year-old F (and his dad!) got to shake the man’s hand.

Every month should end this way.

* I should note that the first chapter, a nongraphic yet foreboding buildup to the fatal Apollo 1 fire in 1967, was a bit much for S. I’ll be selecting only choice bits from here on out.

When 7-year-old S becomes 8-year-old S later this month, we’re going to celebrate in Houston at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. To help get him and 3-year-old F fired up for the trip, we’ve rented Apollo 13 and loaded up on books about the history (mostly) of the U.S. space program.

Our shelves are currently sagging with these titles:

• Blasting Off: Rockets Then and Now by Steven Otfinoski
• Liftoff: A Photobiography of John Glenn by Don Mitchell
• One Giant Leap: The Story of Neil Armstrong by Don Brown
• The Man Who Went to the Far Side of the Moon: The Story of Apollo 11 Astronaut Michael Collins by Bea Uusma Schyffert
• Spacebusters: The Race to the Moon by Philip Wilkinson
• Apollo: The Epic Journey to the Moon by David West Reynolds
• To Space & Back by Sally Ride with Susan Okie
• Adventure in Space: The Flight to Fix the Hubble by Elaine Scott and Margaret Miller
• Floating in Space and Mission to Mars by Franklin M. Branley and illustrated by True Kelly
• The Adventures of Sojourner: The Mission to Mars That Thrilled the World by Susi Trautmann Wunsch

And where, you may ask, is Catherine Thimmesh‘s Sibert winner and Cybils shortlister, Team Moon? Well, not in either of my local public libraries, but if they’ve got it in the NASA gift shop, I have a feeling we’ll be bringing it home. It beats freeze-dried ice cream any day.

It’s been a while since my last listing of U.S. history titles pulled together for the homeschooling of 7-year-old S and soon-to-be-3-year-old F, and there have been a couple of key developments in the meantime.

First, S has become all the more independent as a reader — bedtime stories have become the exception, by his choice — and as a result I’m focusing on picture books for the Barton boy who is still lap-ready.

Second, F received drums for Christmas, so this month, we’re reading about musical figures — singers, instrumentalists, and composers alike — which means we’ve got aural examples of the work of most of the folks that we’re reading about.

As I’ve noted before, there’s a disproportionate number of picture books written about jazz musicians, but there’s a lot to love about and learn from many of them. There’s another way to look at the situation, however: It may be that other genres have simply been underrepresented so far, and there are encouraging signs that this is being corrected.

This spring will see the second children’s history of country music in as many years. My friend Gary Golio has forthcoming picture book titles about Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix. I myself have manuscripts in the works profiling a couple of overlooked giants in 20th century American music. For all of these as-yet-unveiled works, I’m hopeful that readers will come away with a sense not merely of key artists’ popularity and how that success was measured — gold records, Billboard rankings, and the like — but of how their time, place and circumstances fired their artistry, and what their work meant to their audiences then and now.

As for those books already on the shelves, there are far more worthy titles than one family can take on in a single month. These that I’ve listed below are simply those that caught my eye. If you’ve read them already, what did you think? Which others would you recommend?

What Charlie Heard
by Mordecai Gerstein

If I Only Had a Horn: Young Louis Armstrong
by Roxane Orgill and illustrated by Leonard Jenkins

Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue
by Anna Harwell Celenza and illustrated by JoAnn E. Kitchel

Ella Fitzgerald: The Tale of a Vocal Virtuosa
by Andrea Davis Pinkney and illustrated by Brian Pinkney

This Land is Your Land
by Woody Guthrie and illustrated by Kathy Jakobsen

David Gets His Drum
by David “Panama” Francis and Bob Reiser and illustrated by Eric Velasquez

When Marian Sang
by Pam Muñoz Ryan and illustrated by Brian Selznick

Charlie Parker played be bop
by Chris Raschka

Looking for Bird in the Big City
by Robert Burleigh and illustrated by Marek Los

Buddy: The Story of Buddy Holly
by Anne Bustard and illustrated by Kurt Cyrus

Celia Cruz, Queen of Salsa
by Veronica Chambers and illustrated by Julie Maren

Last month, it was all about 2-year-old F and birds. This month, following 7-year-old S’s trip to Sea World, his indignation over tuna depletion, and his insistence that he’s ready to see Jaws (no, not merely this version), the books I’ve brought home for our U.S. history reading have a distinct aquatic theme.

They include:

• Surprising Sharks (Candlewick, 2003) by Nicola Davies and illustrated by James Croft
• Close to Shore: The Terrifying Shark Attacks of 1916 (Crown, 2003) by Michael Capuzzo
• The Cod’s Tale (Putnam, 2001) by Mark Kurlansky and illustrated by S. D. Schindler
• Salmon Summer (Houghton Mifflin, 1998) by Bruce McMillan
• Whaling Days (Clarion, 1993) by Carol Carrick and illustrated by David Frampton
• Gone A-Whaling (Clarion, 1998) by Jim Murphy
• Nobody Particular (Henry Holt, 2000) by Molly Bang, who writes on her web site, “Now that I have some distance from it, what a royally stupid title for a book. It should have been called Outrageous Warrior or Crazy Woman Warrior or even Passionate Shrimper Fights Chemical Plant Polluters.”

You know, not once have 7-year-old S or 2-year-old F expressed a burning desire to learn more about, say, the United States between 1875 and 1925. But in the U.S. history books I’ve been bringing home each month, that’s exactly how I’ve been compartmentalizing things — by sheer chronology. It makes things easy to plan, and the chronological approach is the way I was taught, so why shouldn’t it work for them?

Well, as I just said, they don’t care about the United States between 1875 and 1925. What they care about — depending on the time of day, the weather, what they had for lunch, what they caught a glimpse of while out and about, etc., etc. — are birds, rockets, sharks, explosives, banjos, apples, and so forth. And they aren’t exactly hiding these passions from anybody. It just takes a halfway attentive parent to pick up on them.

So, I’m going to keep introducing them to U.S. history, but I’m going to do it by theme — and the themes are going to be picked by S and F themselves, whether they realize it or not. Maybe it will take exactly a month for a theme to wear out its welcome — if so, how convenient for me. But some themes will take less time, others may take more, which will make it somewhat harder to plan these posts. So be it.

Many of the titles I’ll expose them to won’t look like history books at all, and some won’t even be children’s books. The idea is that I’m going to give them more of what they’re already passionate about, and let their curiosity and the contextual details in these books do the rest. And we’re going to start today, with birds.

The Bald Eagle’s View of American History (Charlesbridge, 6/06) has come along at just the right time for us. Author C.H. Colman and illustrator Joanne Friar place a bald eagle over the Bering land bridge as the first people arrive on the continent, and they entwine the stories of eagles and Americans up to the present day. The third strand in this episodic book, Colman’s passion for collecting stamps, depicts many of those intersections, such as the Screaming Eagles of the 101st Airborne Division and “the Eagle has landed.”

Other bird books on our shelves these days include:

• The Boy Who Drew Birds (Houghton Mifflin, 2004), by Jacqueline Davies and illustrated by Melissa Sweet: A delightful account of John James Audubon’s early years.
• Sparrow Jack (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), by Mordecai Gerstein: How the sparrow saved Philadelphia.
• Grandmother’s Pigeon (Hyperion, 1996) by Louise Erdrich and illustrated by Jim LaMarche: In this fantasy, three Passenger pigeons hatch — decades after the species became extinct.
• The True Story of Stellina (Alfred A. Knopf, 2006), by Matteo Pericoli: A baby bird grows up in an apartment in modern Manhattan — a city S and F will get to see for themselves in the next year.
• Birdsong (Harcourt, 1997), by Audrey Wood and illustrated by Robert Florczak: A host of species and songs depicted among children in a variety of contemporary settings.
• Backyard Birds (Houghton Mifflin, 1999), by Jonathan P. Latimer and Karen Stray Nolting and illustrated by Roger Tory Peterson: A children’s field guide filled — but not overstuffed — with information.
• The Lives of Birds (Henry Holt, 1993), by Lester L. Short: Written for adults, but with answers to many of the questions (whatever they may be) I hope S and F will have.

The books covering 1925-1975 have come and gone without sparking any deep inquiries by 7-year-old S or 2-year-old F, and that’s fine. I’m getting more and more comfortable with the idea that I’m doing my job simply by making these books available to them, so I’m going to keep right on doing what I do.

Here’s this month’s haul for U.S. history from 1950-2000:

• César: ¡Sí, Se Puede! Yes, We Can! by Carmen T. Bernier-Grand and illustrated by David Diaz
• Roberto Clemente: Pride of the Pittsburgh Pirates by Jonah Winter and illustrated by Raul Colón
• The Butter Battle Book by Dr. Seuss (Is there a better introduction to the Cold War arms race?)
• Reaching for the Moon by Buzz Aldrin and illustrated by Wendell Minor
• The Bus Ride that Changed History: The Story of Rosa Parks by Pamela Duncan Edwards and illustrated by Danny Shanahan

Here are links to my previous posts on U.S. history reading, which is one of my contributions to the homeschooling free-range learning of my two sons. I always welcome your suggestions for new titles and older books I’ve overlooked.

Prehistory-1621: The List and The Wrap-Up
1622-1750: The List and The Wrap-Up
1750-1800: The List and The Wrap-Up
1775-1825: The List and The Wrap-Up
1800-1850: The List and The Wrap-Up
1825-1875: The List and The Wrap-Up
1850-1900: The List and The Wrap Up
1875-1925: The List and The Wrap-Up
1900-1950: List #1 and Wrap-Up #1; List #2 and Wrap-Up #2
1925-1975: List #1 and Wrap-Up #1; List #2
1950-2000: List #1 and Wrap-Up #1
1975-present: The List and The Wrap-Up