Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt by Deborah Hopkinson paintings by James Ransome

This is a story about an 11 year old black girl named Clara who is a slave. She gets separated from her mother and has to go work in the field. She gets very sad and people start to worry about her health because she has to work hard. A nice lady she calls her Aunt Rachel decides to teach Clara how to quilt so she can get out of the fields and be a seamstress in the house. Clara passes the test and gets to work inside. Once she is inside she learns what a map is and about the underground railroad. She wants to make a map so she decides to make a map on a quilt. By using her knowledge she gained from others she makes the map and then leaves it behind for others when she escapes and finds her Mother and new sister. She hears stories about people who have escaped to the North by studying her quilt.

This would be a great book to read to a 1st to 4th grade class. I really enjoyed it. It has a good lesson that if you stick to your goals you can eventually succeed. It would also be good to talk about slavery and how people used the underground railroad to escape. I think a good classroom activity would be to make a quilt map out of construction paper.