Susannah Richards, professor of education at Eastern Connecticut State University, told me about book graffiti, a fabulous way to share favorite books. This week Ms. Edinger’s house gave it a try. Each student chose one favorite book from the current school year to feature. It could be one read independently or read aloud. They found photos of the book covers and then pasted them on a large sheet of brown paper. After that, students wrote their individual graffiti for the books they loved. The result is fabulous and we are certain to do it again.

Here is Edinger House’s Grafitti Board:

Edinger House has just completed a study of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. One element of our work was with Ms. Edinger’s book, Africa is My Home: A Child of the Amistad. It  features a group of people who were taken captive, resisted, and returned home to their country of Sierra Leone as free people, the story of the Amistad rebellion as seen through the eyes of one of the children aboard, Sarah Margru Kinson. This was followed by a look at poems responding to enslavement by Phillis Wheatley,  George Moses Horton (after learning about him through Don Tate’s Poet: The Remarkable Story of George Moses Horton), James Monroe Whitfield , Langston Hughes,  and Elizabeth Alexander before the children began crafting their own. Some of these are found poems using words and phrases from Ms. Edinger’s book while others used different forms. The finished poems were then presented as collages. The results below are powerful indeed. (Click on any individual collage for a larger image.)