History comes alive for children through personal stories. Grasshoppers in My Bed is the imagined diary of a real-life Minnesota farm girl in 1877, the year she was eleven. For this historical fiction book, author-historian Terry Swanson and illustrator Peggy Stern drew on facts about the real Lillie Belle Gibbs, her family, and their market garden business in a fast-changing landscape.
Classroom teachers, homeschoolers, and parents of eight- to eleven-year-olds will find ways to teach history through these stories and pictures.
Threads and themes:
Building verbal and research skills
Use the questions on the Learn with Lillie page as prompts to get students thinking, talking, and researching. Students can open that page onscreen, or you can ask the questions aloud. Either way, students can use the book as a research tool.
On every page, students can see the threads that make up the details of Lillie's daily life: farm chores, school, family, and community. Later, as students reflect on the book, they can look for themes or patterns. They'll build research skills as they review the book, looking for examples and evidence of threads and themes.
A school day with Lillie
Using Lillie's March 13 diary entry and map, design a lesson on Minnesota geography and watersheds. (Rivers flow in three directions out of the state: south, east, and north. ) Consider a mapmaking project or a field trip related to Minnesota waterways or geology, perhaps using local stones or fossils.
Students could also practice for a spelling bee, as Lillie's class does that day. Lillie's most challenging words were alienate, ascetic, illegibly, and requital.
