Written by Ellen Levine
Illustrated by Kadir Nelson
Scholastic, Inc. 2007
40 pages
Historical Fiction
Henry's Freedom Box is a story that will tug on your heartstrings. It is a story about a slave living in the United States and his struggle through life. He never even knew his own birthday. He always dreams about some day becoming free and living a happy life. He eventually gets married and has a family of his own after being torn from his own family as a boy. He is crushed after he finds his self separated from his family again when his wife and children are sold to different masters. Henry is determined to be free and makes a plan to mail himself to the north in a box. When Henry finally reaches freedom he marks this first day as a free man as his birthday. I chose this book because I really enjoyed reading it in EED 312 and it is now one of my favorites.
The mediums of the illustrations created by Nelson are pencil, oil and watercolors. The illustrations take up the whole page, with the text on the bottom of the pages. The illustrator did a fantastic job of capturing all the feelings and emotions of the slaves and their struggle to survive. It makes you feel like you are actually there. This book received a Caldecott honor.
A fun activity that could be done with this book would be to have your students think about themselves being in the underground railroad and for them to come up with ideas of how they would escape to their freedom. Another fun activity would be to do a reader's theatre and to act out different scenes from the book or even make up their own skit about being a slave. Finally, an activity to get students thinking would be to make teams of two and ask them to pull out real historical facts from the story and research those things. After gathering research and making connections, the teams could present their findings including pictures and other visual aides.
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