Grandmother Bryant's Pocket is a story
about Sarah Bryant, an eight-year-old girl who lived two hundred years
ago on a farm in Maine. When the barn burns down and Sarah's dog
Patches is caught in the fire she begins to have bad dreams. Nothing
her parents do helps Sarah get over these nightmares. So she goes to
live with her Grandmother and Grandfather Bryant. Grandmother Bryant is
a healer and Grandfather Bryant a whittler.
Two hundred years ago pockets were not sewn into women's clothes but
were tied around the waist under a skirt, a bit like our own "fanny
packs" would be if we wore them under our clothes. Grandmother Bryant's
old pocket with its stitches and smells, Grandfather Bryant's stories,
and a one-eyed cat eventually help Sarah get over her nightmares and
even face the biting, pinching geese which had terrified her.
Grandmother Bryant's Pocket won Maine's
Lupine Book Award and was a Bulletin Blue Ribbon book, a School Library
Journal Best Book, an
ALA Notable Book, and a Hungry Mind Review Book of Distinction.
Though its story is set in 1787, this pocket-sized
book tells a timeless
tale about fears and their healing. ... The story unfolds in miniature
chapters, brightened by Petra Mathers' charming and expressive
illustrations. -- reviewed in Hungry Mind Review
(Summer 1997, pg. 28)
Curriculum
Connections to Try
My sister, Audrey Briggs, is a first grade teacher
at the
Plummer-Motz Elementary School in
Falmouth, Maine. She and her students correlated a pocket project with
a reading
of Grandmother Bryant's Pocket. Read about it on the Pocket page.
Students at the George E. Jack School in Standish,
Maine
did a number of projects, with the help of their art teacher related to
Grandmother Bryant's PocketThey made apple head
dolls,
pockets, Gentlemen's leather pouches, and collected recipes using herbs
and craft projects that relate to colonial times. Read about their
projects on the
Standish page on this website.
For more connections read below.
Healing Herbs/Plants --
Two hundred years ago healers could not go
to
the drug store for medicines but depended on various plants to help
people recover from burns, cuts, or other sickness. Some of the plants
they used are plants we can find growing in our own yard.
A good example is the dandelion. You might see
dandelions in your yard or neighborhood. Their seeds were brought to
this country by some of the first immigrants so they could have fresh
greens in the spring. (Some people still use dandelion greens as a
salad green. They must be picked before they blossom -- be careful not
to pick if they have been sprayed with a herbicide -- washed and served
fresh.)
Dandelions have spread all over the United
States. Some people think their leaves and flowers are quite beautiful.
The leaves of the dandelion can be dried and used as part of a picture
collage.
Wild mint was used in tea, and bathwater.
You can often tell a mint plant by its smell. All members of the mint
family have square stems. You can dry mint as Sarah and her grandmother
did. (Before you pick any plant have an adult help you identify it.)
Other important healing plants can be found in our
kitchens.
Onions were a favorite cure for chest colds. They
were chopped up, fried, and wrapped in a cloth that was then placed on
the chest. We now know that onions are a very healthy food. So perhaps
the "chopped onion cure" was a good one.
Find out more about herbs by visiting the Whole Herb web site.
Games to Play and Things to Do --
You might play--or have played--some of the same
games that Sarah Bryant and her cousins would have played, games such
as "London Bridge is Falling Down," or "Here We Go Round the Mulberry
Bush," or "Ring Around a Rosy." Find a book that gives directions for
playing these games.
Try some of the activities that children in
Sarah's
time liked to do:
Children in Sarah's time also liked to go
ice-skating and sledding in the winter.
They collected glass marbles and played marbles
in the spring.
In the summer girls picked hollyhock blossoms
and turned them upside down to be ball gowns for dolls.
They made doll furniture from sticks, milkweed
pods and other things they found.
Sarah's cousin Thomas might have had a small knife that he
used to whittle whistles from chestnut or willow trees.
Children of all ages were expected to work.
Boys whittled brooms and girls were taught to
knit as soon as their hands could hold the needles.
Often they were the ones to go through the wool
sheared from the sheep and take out the straw and twigs.
There were no cameras in Sarah's day. But people
did draw silhouettes, outlines of a shape, like a shadow would make,
and cut them out of black paper.
