The age of exploration is a phrase doing a great deal of quiet work. Somebody explored. Somebody else was already home. Most units teach the first half and never mention that there is a second one, and the reason is usually that the shelf has nothing on it from the other side. This shelf does, which is rare enough to build the whole unit on. Pedro's Journal is Columbus's first crossing, written down day by day by the Spanish ship's boy who was there. Morning Girl is that same ocean in that same year from a Taíno girl on the beach, and its last chapter is the ships arriving, watched by a child who thinks they are guests and swims out to welcome them. Put those two side by side and your class has one event from two decks. There is nothing else you can do in a history block that teaches as much in as little time. Seven books. The range runs from a five-year-old on the carpet to a twelve-year-old carrying two hundred and fifty pages. The first one is a good place to start and that is all it is. Now read the next paragraph before you order anything, because this shelf tilts and you should hear it from me rather than work it out in week three.
Read this before you pick, because the sorting is the lesson. Start with the pairing, which is the reason this shelf is worth building a unit on. Pedro's Journal and Morning Girl are the same event. Same ocean, same autumn, same three ships. Pedro is a Spanish boy on the Santa Maria writing down what he sees: the crossing, the near-mutiny, the people who come out to meet them with gifts, and the men around him working out what can be taken. Morning Girl is a Taíno girl on the island, and for seventy-five pages her book is not about Columbus at all — it is a brother she cannot stand, a baby who does not arrive, a hurricane, an ordinary life — and then a boat appears and she swims out to be a good host and the book stops. Teach them in the same week, and do not explain the connection. A nine-year-old finds it themselves, and the finding is the whole thing. Then the corrective. 1621: A New Look at Thanksgiving exists specifically to dismantle the pageant, and its authority is more particular than the cover suggests: it was made with Plimoth Plantation, and its photographs are of a reenactment staged in October 2000 in cooperation with the Wampanoag community, with Wampanoag people taking part. That is a documented fact about the book and it is why it can say what it says. Read the Mayflower questions and then 1621 and your class watches a famous story get taken apart with photographs. Then the one that is not what people think it is. Giving Thanks is Chief Jake Swamp — Mohawk, of Akwesasne — and it is not a history book and not about Thanksgiving. It is the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving Address, a real practice people say every morning, right now. The Haudenosaunee are not the Wampanoag and this has nothing to do with Plymouth. Dropping it into a Thanksgiving unit as the Native perspective on the holiday is a category error, and knowing that is part of teaching well: it is a prayer, not a counterpoint. It earns its place here for the opposite reason — it is the only book on the shelf where Native people are speaking in the present tense about their own lives instead of answering somebody. Last, the two long ones sit at opposite ends. Encounter is forty pages and the heaviest thing here. Blood on the River is Jamestown from a settler boy's side, and it is the oldest, longest and bloodiest, and it is honest about being told from inside the fort.