Changing The Way We View The World

The Mayflower and The Pilgrims' New World by Nathaniel Philbrick

Education for us is all about reading. We read a lot together and on our own. During our "school time" we always have something that we are reading aloud, usually mid-morning. I read, they eat second breakfast. We have read funny fiction and we have read some serious non-fiction. We recently finished one of our serious non-fiction selections. We have been reading this since the beginning of the year, at the beginning of the year we could only read a few pages before they were begging to move on to funny fiction, but the more we talked about the book, the more we noticed that we had constructed in our minds a false account of these colonists, as well as their Native American friends and foes. Something happened about a month ago... the story clicked and they wanted to know more and more and more. I wasn't starting the discussion, they were. They were interrupting me to make observations and ask questions. I would stop reading and they would beg for more and more. It wasn't uncommon for us to read this book for an hour at a time. The kids would have their sketchpads or play-dough to keep their hands busy and we would get to work at uncovering the story.

This book is at times not the easiest read aloud, I would find myself tongue tied. Some books read aloud smoothly and others require some time and work to uncover the rhythm. But we were okay with the shaky rhythm because we were in love with the adventure and story. We realized that even though we had already discussed in history a couple of times that Europeans had already visited North America, we still believed that these Europeans arriving on the east coast speaking English was a shock to the Native Americans. But the story Philbrick presents is one in which the Native Americans see these strangers and are concerned and frightened because they believe these white men have come to take vengeance for the deaths of some white men they just killed. We meet Native Americans that peak English, just like in Charlie Brown and watch alliances created and destroyed. We learned about King Phillips War and the many mistakes made by both the colonists and the Native Americans.

After reading this I was even more convinced in the necessity of reading non-fiction aloud with my kids. Its easy to make time and read Henry Huggins, but making time to dive into a book like this takes a little bit more resolve. I'm already creating a list of non-ficiton to work our way through that coincides with history, probably too long, but..... the more to choose from, my dear.