Real People
When I first arrived in Tennessee I didn’t know where to start making meaningful connections. (I’m so thankful for all we have now!) I didn’t have the emotional energy to meet new people every day while I worked through a season of personal loss. We were on the tail end of COVID-19 restrictions and all the social limitations it had created. My children needed to get out of the house and connect to the world beyond me!
The library become a refuge, one of the first places that made Tennessee feel like home. (Shout out to Leiper’s Fork Library! It was the perfect size and atmosphere for my family in that season. It was small enough that my toddler couldn’t get lost, but had an enticing selection for all of us.) We later discovered Spring Hill Library which we love as well.
It was in this season of books that I started to delight in the picture book biographies I pulled off the shelves. The stories of real people living with resilience in the time and place they found themselves, fed me with strength in that tired season. I saw a light in my children as they listened to the words and absorbed the captivating illustrations. As it says in the biography, Harriet Tubman by Ann Petry, “But each one who heard the stories, each one who told all of them, or only parts of them, would feel stronger because of her existence. Pride in her would linger on in the teller of the story as well as the listener. Their faith in a living God would be strengthened, their faith in themselves would be renewed.”
I remember reading about the Wright Brothers in To Fly, by Wendie Old, about Teddy Roosevelt and John Muir in The Camping Trip that Changed America, by Barb Rosenstock, and about Sequoyah, The Cherokee Man who Gave his People Writing by James Rumford.
Over the next year I devoured children’s picture biographies and searched them out. These books became the foundation for what we now read in OldSchool Day Class. I have a list of books about inventors, naturalists, scientists, artists, men, and women of all the ethnicities and nationalities I can find.
I intend to keep building my collection and share it with others (website coming soon) but until then check out the biographies on the Read Aloud Revival biography list! Find a cozy moment without distractions and share one with your child, even if they are “too old” for picture books. There are also more and more graphic novels about historic figures coming out. Check out Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales. My kids love The Underground Abductor and Major Impossible.
Until next time,
Amber Porter
