|
|
|
|
April, 2012
Melissa L. Morgan
I enjoyed all of the assignments, especially the Orphan Train Book Talk (included below). However, for me personally, I felt that my most important assignment was Bibliotherapy. The exercise of writing a paper about E.B. White’s classic animal fantasy novel, Charlotte’s Web, was personally important to me, because I learned how to use bibliotherapy to help children heal after the loss of a loved one. All children will eventually need to deal with loss of some kind, as it is a part of life in this sinful, broken world.
Through this assignment, I learned how to use books to guide children and teens cope with social, emotional, or personal problems. Although the focus of the assignment was on helping children, bibliotherapy is also helpful for adults. Adults can also use books to help them to deal with emotions and problems of life. I have experienced this in my own life, especially through reading Christian fiction.
I hope to complete my degree and eventually obtain my teacher’s license, in order to counsel families who are homeschooling with special needs. This assignment has given me another tool to share with families who are struggling with homeschooling a child with challenges such as hyperactivity, cerebral palsy, autism and Down syndrome.
Families with special needs experience issues related to loss on a daily basis. Parents who have a child with special needs often experience grief for the loss of a “perfect” child (although no child, in actuality, is perfect.) Although they love their child fiercely, most also wish their child was “normal.” Often both parents and children must come to grips with both their child’s challenges as well as recognize their child’s gifts.
Typically developing children in homeschool families with special needs also experience loss in many ways. On the one hand, they experience loss because the family cannot usually spend as much time with them, due to the overwhelming task of caring for the needy family member. In addition, siblings of children with special needs may experience the loss of a compatible playmate, and may find it difficult to deal with friends who don’t understand their sibling. Books such as Charlotte’s Web can also be used to help children with special needs learn to be a good friend to others, as well as realize that with loss, there is also hope through Christ.
Sadly, sometimes children with special needs pass away, and this can be emotionally devastating to siblings and parents. Teachers are not licensed counselors. Although I plan to primarily focus on education, there is no way to separate emotional elements from educational concerns. Through this assignment, I have grown by gaining insight and sensitivity into how to use literature to help others heal as well as develop academically.
I feel that I am better equipped to help families in their choices of literature for their homeschool. I would definitely recommend that families homeschooling with special needs read and discuss Charlotte’s Web together with their children. In addition, I learned that parents can guide children in sharing their feelings of loss, through open-ended questions and also drawing pictures.
Running head: BOOK TALK, ORPHAN TRAIN
For over 70 years, orphaned children in dirty, crowded Cities traveled trains to new homes in the west, hoping for loving homes, clean air, and enough food to eat. The first orphan train left the station in 1854; the orphan train program ended in 1929. Sadly, not every child found a loving home, but most found a chance for a new life in a strange new land. This book talk is suitable for fourth grade and up, and could be used to supplement a study on immigration and the industrial revolution. It can also interest children to independently read fictional chapter books, and explore historical nonfiction informational resources.
Imagine that you and your family traveled on a sailing ship, across the ocean, and arrived in New York City. Your father had very little money after paying for the voyage across the ocean, but he hoped to find a job and a better life in the big cities on the East Coast of America. You and your family hoped for a better life, but your father only finds work for pennies a day. You are the oldest child, so you help your mother do wash clothes for other families, and earn a few more pennies. Parents and children all work, but there still isn’t enough money to feed your six siblings. Your family lives in a crowded, dirty tenement building. Rats scurry over you at night, waking you up, and you can smell the outdoor privy when you open the window for air. Your father is killed. You aren’t really an orphan, but your mother faces a horrible choice: watch her children starve, or send them on an orphan train to strangers out west.
Although the last orphan train left the East in 1929, much has been written about the lives and times of these young people. Children of the Orphan Trains, by Holly Littlefield (part of the series, Picture the American Past) shares information and pictures of orphan train children. Let’s look at a few of these pictures in the book. We will also be looking at fictional characters created around the true story of the orphan trains. After my book talk, you can look at each of these materials more closely.
Who were the orphan train children? Some of these children were immigrants, who came to America for a better life. The children worked to help their parents, but they were unable to earn enough money to feed the family. They couldn’t go to school, because they had to work to live. Most did not know how to read or write. Often poor children worked dangerous jobs along with their parents. Many children were orphaned when their parents were killed or became sick from diseases which spread quickly through crowded, unhealthy tenements.
In the eighteen and early nineteen hundreds, thousands of children lived on the streets—some were orphans but others had been abandoned by parents who couldn’t take care of them. Boys tried to make money for food selling newspapers, shining shoes, or sweeping streets. Little girls, sometimes hardly more than babies, sold flowers, matches, or rags collected from garbage. Still others stole food or begged. On page 11 in the book Children of the Orphan Trains, we see three homeless children resting. What do you see in this picture?
Littlefield (2001) tells us that “Life on the streets was hard. Children slept in outhouses, on steam grates, or in garbage bins. Most wore only rags for clothing. In the winter, they wrapped their feet in newspaper to keep them from freezing.”
It seems that anything would be better than life on the streets. Yet orphanages were overcrowded, and resources in the cities were stretched too thin. In 1853, a young Christian minister named Charles Loring Brace started the Children’s Aid Society. Brace believed that it was better to remove orphans and homeless children from the dangers of city life, and give them a new life and loving families (Littlefield, 2001, page 19). Brace developed a program to find new families for children, by sending them on trains across the country.
Adoptive families had to promise to take good care of the children, including educating them at school and church. Unfortunately, although the Society had good intentions, some adoptive families were still abusive. The Society tried to protect the children and put them in a good home. Regrettably, some children suffered from being separated—sometimes forever--from siblings and former relatives.
According to the a historical web site, the Orphan Train Depot, http://orphantraindepot.com, as many as 200,000 children were “placed out” into new homes through Orphan Trains. First, children went to homes in states along the eastern coast, but there were not enough families to take the orphans. So children were sent further and further west. Let’s look at a map of the United States, showing how many children were “placed out” in each state. As you can see, over 7000 children found new families in our state of Ohio. Thousands of children today are descended from these children.
Orphan Train Fiction
Over the next several weeks, we will be reading about the fictional adventures of children on the orphan trains. We will also write and share short poems about our favorite characters.
Joan Lowery Nixon has written an Orphan Train Children book series, as well as The Orphan Train Quartet books. The first Orphan Train Children book, Aggie’s Home, features a twelve year old girl in 1866. Fliers were sent out, advertising for families at the towns along the way. View one of the advertisements at the Orphan Train Depot, in the front of Aggie’s Home. Here is a map, from 1866, showing Orphan Train Routes across the United States. On the map, we can trace Aggie’s journey from the foundling home in New Jersey to her new happy family in Missouri.
Aggie hates the Asylum for Homeless Waifs in New York City, and is labeled a troublemaker. After she is chosen to ride on the orphan train, she worries about how she will be treated. Will anyone want her? Other books featured in Nixon’s Orphan Train Children series are David’s Search, Will’s Choice, Lucy’s Wish.
Nixon’s Orphan Train Quartet features the stories of six Kelly children. Their mother, unable to care for them, sends them from New York City to find new homes in the west. What will become of them? Can they stay together? Books by Nixon in the Orphan Train Quartet include A Family Apart, A Place to Belong, Caught in the Act, and In the Face of Danger. The oldest Kelly child, Francis, grows up to help other orphans find homes out west, through the Children’s Aid Society, and is an adult character in Aggie’s Home..
Many poems and stories have been written about children on the orphan trains. Fourth Grade Students wrote and published acrostic poems based upon Nixon’s book, A Family Apart.
Here is a sample, written about the oldest of the Kelly children:
“Frances
Mary Kelly is the oldest sibling
Responsible
is Frances' number 1 personality
Always
watching after Petey, one of her siblings
Never
gets in trouble
Concentrates
on everything she does
Encouraging
to her brothers and sisters
Secure
to her little brother Petey…”
Read more poems based on Characters from Nixon’s Orphan Train Quartet here: http://kids-learn.org/orphantrain/acrostic.htm.
Here’s another poem about the Orphan Train, written by Robert G. English:
The Orphan Train
“…I happened to meet a Orphan
Train survivor
She remembered all too vividly the train being her
savior
She never remembered her parents she lost
She remembered
her twin sister her eyes still teared at great cost
She knew it
was for the better their final separation…”--Robert G.
English http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-orphan-train/
In addition to books and poems, the orphan train has been featured in film. A full length television movie, Orphan Train, was created in 1979, but is not available on DVD. It can be viewed complete, on the internet, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcSyP6_3j3w. (Used or library VHS copies of the film may still exist.) A television show, Paradise, featured a fictional story about orphans who arrive out west. What happens to them in their new home? Watch it on YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsZPK9n6qxg&feature=related .
Al & Joanna Lacy also wrote an Orphan Trains Trilogy book series. Although written for older readers, you won’t want to miss them. Book 1 in the Trilogy, The Little Sparrows, tells the adventures of orphans Mary, Johnny, and Lizzie Marston. What will happen to them in their new homes in Wyoming? Will they be separated?
Book 2 of The Orphan Trains Trilogy, All My Tomorrows, features the story of four children: Teddy Hansen, orphaned when his mother dies of pneumonia, young Johnny, whose police officer father is killed by bank robbers, and abandoned twins Donna and Deena Mitchell. Whispers in the Wind completes the trilogy, relating the story of young Dane Weston, who is a street waif begging for food. Will he be able to achieve his dream of becoming a doctor, or will he end up in prison?
Lacy states that from the Orphan Train riders, “two of the orphans grew up to become state governors, several became mayors, one became a Supreme Court justice, two became congressmen, thirty-five became lawyers, and nineteen became physicians. Others became successful gospel preachers, lawmen, farmers, ranchers, businessmen, wives, and mothers-those who made up a great part of society in the West…. Brace’s influence was felt by virtually every program established to help homeless and needy children.” (Lacy, 2003, pg. 11)
Kids Learn, http://kids-learn.org/orphantrain/acrostic.htm.
Lacy, Al & Joanna Lacy (2002) , the Orphan Trains Trilogy, Multnomah, Sistera, Oregon.
Littlefield, Holly (2001), Children of the Orphan Trains, Carolrhoda Books, Minneapolis, MN, 11.
Nixon, Joan Lowery (1998), Orphan Train Children series, Delacorte Press, New York, NY.
Nixon, Joan Lowery (1987, 1988), The Orphan Train Quartet: A Family Apart, Bantam Books,
Toronto, New York, London, Sydney, Aukland.
Orphan Train Depot, historical web site, http://orphantraindepot.com.
“Orphan Train” Paradise television episode,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsZPK9n6qxg&feature=related.
Orphan Train, television movie, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QcSyP6_3j3w
Poem Hunter, http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-orphan-train .