Little House on the Prairie
One of the most important moments in my literacy development happened in the third grade when my teacher, Mrs. Stutzman, handed each student in class a paperback copy of “Little House in the Big Woods” for our next reading assignment. After she gave us a brief introduction to pioneer life and Laura Ingalls Wilder, we were given the rest of our reading period to get started on the first chapter. I knew just a few pages in that I felt differently about this book than any other humdrum reading assignment I had been given before. I had never felt such warmth and delight reading. I wanted to get home straight away so that I could read more. Little did I know that would be the first book of a series that would have …show more content…
Never before had I much interest in what came before me. Now I was captivated by the idea of living off the land and relying on hunting, planting crops, and sheer luck for survival. Learning about pioneers living in lean tos, dugouts with a hill for a ceiling and building cabins from scratch from the trees they cut down themselves, became interesting to me instead of boring. I wanted to know how they salted pork and smoked deer meat to make it keep all year round without refrigeration. I wanted to know more about how it felt walking barefoot everywhere, even to the one room school house five miles away in the warmer months to learn arithmetic using a slate and chalk. It was all so foreign to me, yet intriguing. Lucky for me, my grandma had some experience in that department from when she was growing …show more content…
We didn’t have much in common. Finally this was something we could share. My love of bonnets and prairie dresses was something my grandma understood. She was able to share stories from her childhood and I was able to appreciate them. It really was an opportunity for us to learn about each other. The summer after my third grade year we would pick projects out of the books that we could do together. One of my favorites was making soap. I can’t remember exactly how the soap turned out, but I know we made such a huge mess in the kitchen that for the first time in history grandpa scolded us both. She just laughed and told him we were having too much fun to worry about cleanliness and she promised him we would clean up when we were done. The older I got and the more foreign I became to her, we could still talk about Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House on the Prairie series. Towards the end of her life it became a way for us to break an uncomfortable silence that would sometimes fall over us as she lay in her bed at the nursing home and I sat awkwardly in the chair next to her not quite knowing what to
One of the most important moments in my literacy development happened in the third grade when my teacher, Mrs. Stutzman, handed each student in class a paperback copy of “Little House in the Big Woods” for our next reading assignment. After she gave us a brief introduction to pioneer life and Laura Ingalls Wilder, we were given the rest of our reading period to get started on the first chapter. I knew just a few pages in that I felt differently about this book than any other humdrum reading assignment I had been given before. I had never felt such warmth and delight reading. I wanted to get home straight away so that I could read more. Little did I know that would be the first book of a series that would have …show more content…
Never before had I much interest in what came before me. Now I was captivated by the idea of living off the land and relying on hunting, planting crops, and sheer luck for survival. Learning about pioneers living in lean tos, dugouts with a hill for a ceiling and building cabins from scratch from the trees they cut down themselves, became interesting to me instead of boring. I wanted to know how they salted pork and smoked deer meat to make it keep all year round without refrigeration. I wanted to know more about how it felt walking barefoot everywhere, even to the one room school house five miles away in the warmer months to learn arithmetic using a slate and chalk. It was all so foreign to me, yet intriguing. Lucky for me, my grandma had some experience in that department from when she was growing …show more content…
We didn’t have much in common. Finally this was something we could share. My love of bonnets and prairie dresses was something my grandma understood. She was able to share stories from her childhood and I was able to appreciate them. It really was an opportunity for us to learn about each other. The summer after my third grade year we would pick projects out of the books that we could do together. One of my favorites was making soap. I can’t remember exactly how the soap turned out, but I know we made such a huge mess in the kitchen that for the first time in history grandpa scolded us both. She just laughed and told him we were having too much fun to worry about cleanliness and she promised him we would clean up when we were done. The older I got and the more foreign I became to her, we could still talk about Laura Ingalls Wilder and the Little House on the Prairie series. Towards the end of her life it became a way for us to break an uncomfortable silence that would sometimes fall over us as she lay in her bed at the nursing home and I sat awkwardly in the chair next to her not quite knowing what to