Perfect Picture Book Friday/ Virgie Goes To School With Us Boys

Hi Friends!

Here is a gift for my writer friends.

For critiquing picture books. Hey! Writers! Here are guidelines to write by. http://kathytemean.wordpress.com/2009/12/14/top-ten-question-dutton-editors-ask-themselves/

And one more

Writer’s Digest writing machine: http://masterwriter.com/creative_writer/mwtourfinal.html  all ready for down load. When my computer failed and had to be reset I lost this. And had to buy another one. This time I got the CD so if my computer died again I would have it. I didn’t have it most of the summer and really missed it.  Any writer needs something like this. And for poets? Well! I haven’t tried it but it has a great setting for finding all those syllables to rhyme. I LOVE it.

So now here’s the reason we see each other.

Title: Virgie Goes To School With Us Boys

Author/ Illustrator: Elizabeth Fitzgerald Howard/E. B. Lewis

Award: Coretta Scott King Award

Publisher: Simon and Schuster Books for Young Readers, 2000, Juvenile fiction.

Resources:For teacher guides from kindergarten to fourth grade- from Pre- reader:  click here. 

An in-depth look into E. B. Lewis’s art with this bio:

Themes: TRUE FICTION (Fiction Based On True Stories),   Growing up, GIRLS/GIRL POWER, GENDER ROLES, RELATIONSHIPS,  FAMILY, EDUCATIONAL,  African-American, US History 1849-1877

Jacket Says: “All Virgie wants is to go to school with her brothers, George, Will, Nelson, Val, and C. C. But they keep saying she’s too little for the long 7 mile walk, and that girls don’t need school. Well, Virgie doesn’t agree and she’s not going to let anything stand in her way.”

Summary of Book: In the post-Civil War South, a young African-American girl is determined to prove that she can go to school just like her older brothers.

Why I loved it: I love anything civil war or post civil war. And I love reading Coretta Scott King Award books. The story is captivating and there is back-matter that is educational. I can identify with Virgie because though I am white, I wanted to do everything my older brothers did, so this book has wide kid appeal. Written in C. C.’s voice as narrator, Virgie asks him to be mediator between her and her parents and older brothers. The book describes how Virgie works alongside her Mama and Papa in the fields and kitchen for two more summers till Papa says she is old enough for school. Everything is all set and they are underway but Virgie slips on a wet stone. One of her brothers says she’ll cry—but she doesn’t, she laughs. And so on in the book. I especially like the ending with a twist which circles back to the beginning.

In the back-matter one learns that the author’s grandfather was C. C. or Cornelius E. Fitzgerald when he went to school at Warner institute founded by Quakers, “a first step in going to Howard University and becoming a lawyer.

Please join other bloggers in Perfect Picture Book Friday over at Susanna Leonard Hill’s site to see other fun books. http://susannahill.blogspot.com/p/perfect-picture-books.html

For more links to Perfect Picture Books, a collection of bloggers who contribute at Susanna Leonard Hill’s site, click here.

See all of you Tuesday! xxxooo

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