TCI Lesson 1: Discovering Social Sciences connection.
In Hatfield, Massachusetts, at the turn of the last century, the three Howes brothers took photographs of local residents and their homes. Yolen's son, Jason Stemple, photographed these same houses with their current owners, and children will delight in seeing how much remains the same as well as how much has changed. Although some of her facts are too all-encompassing, Yolen's account is full of the kind of stuff kids really want to know: in 1898 sugar was 4 cents a pound, whereas today it's $2 for a five-pound bag, or 40 cents a pound; in 1900 an electric trolley ran from Hatfield to Northampton, while today there's no public transportation at all. Best of all, Yolen describes the attic room in her own house, which was the maid's in 1906, and is now the place where Yolen writes "from sunup to sundown." The Howes' sepia photographs of the beautiful, rambling houses, with their families arranged in front of porches and doorways, survived in thousands of glass-plate negatives; those images face a contemporary, crisp color incarnation on each spread. The pithy text never fails to engage; for example, Yolen tells us that in the early 1800s, Hatfield girls could go to school for only four months of the year--the town wouldn't pay for more.