★★★★★ 5
This was a favorite fourth grade class book club book during a study of Native Americans.
Format: Paperback
This year my fourth grade class read the book Children of the Longhouse as a book club book. They were divided into groups of 4 and 5, and each day they would prepare a section of the book to read, and discuss it. Then the leader that day of each group shared what they thought. I don't want to spoil the story, but we were examining the relationships that the characters and the community in the book had to nature, and my students loved that. They found it interesting to learn about the beliefs, and that the challenges people had to face and overcome. They loved the climax and the ending too. Characters that they had felt were "bad guys" led to discussions of what options people in another culture might have which would necessitate them doing things that seem bad to us, like disobeying adult advice. I love the way this book fleshes out a pre European existence in the Northeast that helps us picture what life might have been like in an Iroquois village. We love the role that LaCross plays. My students use the Iroquois word for it. I pointed out the glossary at the back with pronunciations for Mohawk words, and my students loved using them and would even discuss how to correctly pronounce them. The book introduced my students to many ideas that they had never been exposed to, and they cared about the characters a lot. They also loved discussing the book more in an in depth way, and then hearing what other groups had had to say. I was interesting how similar the things that each group shared were. We can see that we need to shift our attitudes and be more connected to the natural world all around us.
WAS THIS REVIEW HELPFUL?YesReportShare
Reviewed in the United States on December 17, 2019
