Buy This Book!: Seedfolks

The object in America is to avoid contact, to treat all as foes unless they're known to be friends. Here you have a million crabs living in a million crevices. . . . But the garden's greatest benefit, I feel, as not relief to the eyes, but to make the eyes sees our neighbors.~excerpted from Seedfolks

So I'm sitting in a teacher's professional development session today for roughly seven hours being re-taught Paula Rutherford's Instruction for All program I received when I started teaching over ten years ago. I started working in a new school district two years ago, so as far as they are concerned I might as well have just come off the pickle boat and require training... Truth is, though, that I do appreciate the opportunity to talk with my colleagues from other schools in the district and share the books we are teaching. Yesterday I selected a book from my brand spanking-new classroom library and today I decided it would be my next literary unit (right after the district mandated research project!).

Seedfolks by Newbery Medal Winner Paul Fleischman (with illustrations by Judy Pederson) is a book that I had heard of, but never read, and now that I have started it, I am so glad I did not miss the opportunity afforded me... I love this book!

Although I am very late to this party (the book is chosen as a state and citywide read in communities across the country), I strongly recommend it. Seedfolks is a simply written, delicate look at a number of issues of importance to each of us: diversity, difference, acceptance and community, as they are played out through the individual voices of thirteen very different characters--old, young, Haitian, Hispanic, tough, haunted, and hopeful. These voices, together, tell one amazing story about a garden that transforms a neighborhood.

Breathe in, breathe out... YOU AND I ARE ALIVE!