a friendship for today by patricia c mckissack

Teaching children about honesty is extremely difficult when you think about it. So, if you don’t know Patricia McKissack, make sure to get your hands on some of her books when your libraries open back up!Īnd now for today’s book, The Honest-to-Goodness Truth. From Flossie and the Fox and Mirandy and Brother Wind published back in the 1980s, to her numerous picture book biographies, to her more recent Goin’ Someplace Special (published in 2000) and What is Given From the Heart from last year, McKissack’s books have been go-tos of mine from my classroom days to my parenting days. Let me start by saying that Patricia McKissack is one of my all-time favorite picture book authors. And this week, we read an absolute gem - The Honest-to-Goodness Truth by Patricia McKissack, illustrated by Giselle Potter. (Oct.Don’t you worry, we’re still reading all the best honesty books over here for our Family Focus trait of honesty for May! Though we don’t really have formal trait-building activities to go with honesty month as we have in the past, we are still reading our honesty picture books and adding to our honesty chart. McKissack's skillful presentation of the obstacles confronting minorities after the Civil War makes this not only a captivating tale, but a comprehensive introduction to a pivotal period in U.S.

The novel's climax scene, in which Apaches, white Army soldiers, and African American neighbors join together to defend the Crossmans' property, seems a bit Utopian for the era, but readers will cheer for Sky as he leads the defense of ''his family's land'' against a white supremacist group.

McKissack's (Sojourner Truth: Ain't I a Woman?) multidimensional storytelling chronicles the complex relationship between Sky, the Crossmans, the African American community and the white community, resulting in an exciting, tension-packed page-turner. They nurse him back to health and convince the authorities to release him into their care. One day they find a 15-year-old Apache named Sky in their barn, sick with a fever. Although slavery has ended, old attitudes die hard in the South, and the three struggle daily to protect their land from prejudiced and greedy Sheriff Johnson (who relentlessly pesters them with unfair share-cropping propositions). The story centers on 12-year-old Sarah Jane Crossman, her father (a former slave turned farmer) and her part-Seminole mother. In this intriguing historical novel, which was inspired by the author's research into her own ancestry, an African American family in Alabama takes in an Apache runaway teenager in the late 1800s.

A friendship for today by patricia c mckissack