Focus Titles: Prairie Songs and My Daniel

We have almost finished the first two focus titles of the year, both historical novels set on the Nebraska prairie, by children's author Pam Conrad.

The AM class has been reading Prairie Songs, a coming-of-age story about a young girl whose life is changed by the tragic life of a young doctor's wife from New York.

The PM class has been reading My Daniel, a heart-rending story told in flashbacks by a grandmother taking her two grandchildren through the Museum of Natural History in New York.


A third Pam Conrad book, Prairie Visions: The Life and Times of Solomon Butcher, is a related nonfiction title about a man who photographed the people who lived on the Nebraska prairie in the late 1800s. The book is a great visual for Pam Conrad's readers, giving us a peek back in time to see what prairie soddies and the pioneers who lived in them were like.

In addition to reading these great books, we have been studying Pam Conrad's writing craft, particularly the way she writes original similes and metaphors to create visuals in the reader's mind. We are learning how to recognize these figurative literary devices in writing and also how to use them in our own writing.

In Prairie Songs, Louisa, the main character, memorizes a poem by Tennyson to recite at the Fourth of July festivities. We are memorizing the poem, too.

The Eagle: A Fragment

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

There are a few surprises yet to come in our Pam Conrad prairie unit, but if I revealed them now it would spoil all the fun. So stay tuned and perhaps there will be a follow-up post.

Focus Title: Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle

Some of you may remember Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle, the popular anthology of modern verse from the 1960s (original cover shown below). The second edition has been updated and revised, and we have been reading it for several weeks now. This collection of poetry contains some of the best and most familiar modern poems in print, and each section has an unwritten theme we try to decipher. We will continue to read through this volume in small doses into the new year, and students will be selecting a new poem from this collection to memorize.

The first poem all students memorized this year was "The Eagle" by Tennyson. The poem was used in the the novel Prairie Songs by Pam Conrad, AM class's first focus title of the year.

The Eagle: A Fragment

He clasps the crag with crooked hands;
Close to the sun in lonely lands,
Ring'd with the azure world, he stands.

The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls;
He watches from his mountain walls,
And like a thunderbolt he falls.

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Later, when we read Love That Dog by Sharon Creech, students selected one of the featured poems in the book to memorize. The favorites were "Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening" and "The Pasture" by Robert Frost, as well as "Dog" by Valerie Worth.