Archive for the 'Historical Fiction' Category

What is a Good Work of Historical Fiction?

We’ve been doing a lot of talking recently about historical fiction.  For example, you read my historical fiction version of Margru’s story. We’ve also read various picture books that are historical fiction, say Veronica Chambers’ Amistad Rising. The question is: what make these books good historical fiction? You have all just read what I consider [...]

Africa is My Home: The Story of Sarah Margru Kinson

As part of our study of historical fiction, I read aloud Amistad Rising by Veronica Chambers with illustrations by Paul Lee. Now we are going to look at the Amistad story again through the eyes of one of its participants — Sarah Margru Kinson. The Amistad captives were mostly Mende, people who live in a [...]

What is a good work of historical fiction?

We’ve been doing a lot of talking recently about historical fiction.  For example, you read my historical fiction version of Margru’s story. We’ve also read a lot of picture books about forced immigration that are historical fiction, say Veronica Chambers’ Amistad Rising.  What make these books good historical fiction? You have all just read what [...]

Commenting on Historical Fiction

Today you are going to begin to write comments. First we will look at some comments on this post on Ms. Edinger’s blog and make a list of characteristics of good comments. Here they are: good comments agree or disagree with ideas good topics generate good comments good comments generate a real conversation good comments [...]

Your Historical Fiction Book Post

So, you’ve finished your book. Bravo! Now you are going to collect information and then use it to write a great post showing us just how the book you read is a good example of historical fiction. First of all, I will model for you how to collect the information with a book called Amistad [...]

Commenting on Historical Fiction

Today Ms. Nickles and I will show you how it is possible to develop a conversational thread in the comment section of a blog post. Some of you have done this already, but most of you have not. To give you an idea of how it works go here. As you will see, I made [...]

Immigration Historical Fiction Project: Write about your book

1. Look in your book for good examples of historical research and literary devices and mark those places with post-its 2. Choose the best ones and write them on your worksheet (3 for each) 3. Get a laptop and in MS Word, write a rough draft paragraph explaining why your book is a good example [...]

Immigration Historical Fiction Project: Rough Draft Paragraph

Here is the rough draft of a paragraph that we wrote together using our examples of historical research and figurative language: Amistad Rising by Veronica Chambers is a historical fiction book about Mende captives from Sierra Leone who rebelled against the slave traders to win their freedom. Veronica Chambers uses lots of good descriptions and [...]

Immigration Historical Fiction Project: Finding Examples

Here is an example from the book we read together, Amistad Rising: