p23-29 Green Stucco House

I’m really enjoying the characters and the feel of the culture and time period. I think it’s very easy, at least for me, to identify with a book like this, even one that’s incredibly outside my personal experience. However, one thing to keep in mind is that this is just a single story. Not all Black girls in the 60’s have mothers who don’t want them. What the shame is is that kids who don’t enjoy reading the way I do now and I did as a child, even though I don’t recall stories like this being readily accessible to me aside from Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry which I read the whole series of, those kid don’t get to read and experience multiple stories. A couple classroom techniques I could mention to my students could be having different students read different books and then sharing their stories in order to increase the multiplicity of available stories. Unfortunately, I don’t think there are other fictional stories that address this particular time period. Another option could be to use short non-fiction pieces such as news paper articles or excerpts from books to add in these alternative viewpoints in a time-period/cultural/event specific way. Another question that I usually address as part of contemporary realistic fiction is the idea also of how common the story is. I think I could tie in to that while teaching historical fiction to as a way of testing if the particular story is a wide experience or narrow or what elements of it go each direction.