I've written before about Singing Wheels--the iconic textbook from my fourth-grade years. It's a kind of Eric Sloane for kids-- a reader-friendly look at life on the frontier in the early 19th century, as a town comes into being with a blacksmith, a sawmill, and a gristmill, adding in time a teacher and a cobbler.
There are lots of line drawing cataloguing the clothes and implements of daily life, as well as color illustrations showing the myriad activities of the settlers--travel by stagecoach, spinning, hog butchering, bridge building, on and on.
I thought it might be good to try it on Josie--she has the reading vocabulary to deal with it--though she may be daunted by the density of the text,
So I began to reread it and almost right away, my woke sensibilities hit (see above) a silly woman having trouble telling her left from her right. Hmm. Okay, I'll let that slide, particularly as the other women in the story are admirable, but I don't like it.
Then Tom asked his father if there were any Indians around and was told "the government bought their lands and moved them west. . ."
Oh, how much double-dealing and misery is dismissed in the sentence. While I'm not sure of the best way to explain to a child the Trail of Tears and the terrible treatment of the Native Americans, I couldn't just leave it at this.
And then there's the chapter where wolves are killing the livestock and the men and boys surround them and kill them all. Yikes!
I know, I know, back then it was a matter of survival for the settlers. Today it's about the survival of an endangered species. Weird how that works.
Still, I think I'll hold off on offering Singing Wheels to Josie just yet.
