I Believe I Can Fly!!!!!!!

 

Title: Way Up and Over Everything

Author: Alice McGill

Illustrator: Jude Daly

Publishing Company: Houghton Mifflin

Copyright Date: 2008

Pages: 32

Genre/category: Children/Folktale

I chose this book because I enjoy reading about my heritage, especially since I come from a very well blended family, and I have to refresh my memory about my heritage sometimes. Have you just ever had the feeling that you could do something spontaneous and never knew about it? Well that is how I felt after reading this book. This story is told to Alice; it has been passed down from generation to generation. Her great grandmother, Jane, was a slave born on Ol’ Man Deboreaux’s Georgia plantation. In the spring of 1842, when Jane was sixteen, Ol’ Man Deboreaux bought five new Africans (two men and three women) off the boat in Charleston. The new Africans were brought to the plantation to work like the other slaves in the farm. After working the fields, during dinner time the new Africans disappeared and were nowhere to be found. The master and his overseer trying-to-get-way dogs and Jane tracked the new African to the field. What she saw was them performing an African ritual while whirling around in a circle and stepping into the air and flying away. Although she was told not to tell anyone what she had seen by her master, Ol’ Man Deboreaux, she told it anyway to her family, who told their family and the story continued.

The illustrations in this book are done in watercolors with lots of browns and touches of green, red, and yellow throughout.  The picture detail can be used with no words to explain the story. The drawings are sharp, jagged and on double-page spread. I loved the way the illustrator captured every detail of the illustrations with the words.

 

This book would be appropriate for third through sixth grade because the text is simple with a couple of unknown words. I would use this in an elementary classroom to introduce African American history, slavery and history in reading, history, and social studies. Because this is a story passed down from generation to generation I would ask the students if their parents have ever told them something significant (story, memory, recipe, heirloom, or article that had much meaning) that they passed down. This can be used to talk about different cultural in the world. I would use a semantic map as a way to introduce the story while using the following words (master, overseer, cotton, cottonseed, whip, freedom, African, and Africa) with plantation as the leading word. This book has several awards, 2009 Notable children’s book, 2008 School Library Journal, NCSS Notable Social Studies Trade Books for Young People 2009.