4th and 5th Graders Research and Present Posters of the Presidents of the USA

Albert Einstein A Life of Genius by Elizabeth MacLeod

This morning a student came to my desk. "Ms Peggy", he said. "I'm Ms Nancy", I said. "Oh, yeah" he said, "I want to know about Einstein. You know the E = mc2 guy? And I want a picture because I want to draw him!" I assured him I would get what he needed and brought this book with the four drawings below to his classroom. He asked me these kinds of questions all last year too. So glad!

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Julian Bond (January 14, 1940 – August 15, 2015)

Julian Bond, a civil rights activist and longtime board chairman of the NAACP, died Saturday, August 15, 2015, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

He was 75.

The Nashville, Tenn. native was considered a symbol and icon of the 1960s civil rights movement. As a Morehouse College student, Bond helped found the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee and as its communications director, he was on the front lines of protests that led to the nation's landmark civil rights laws.

Bond later served as board chairman of the 500,000-member NAACP for 10 years but declined to run again for another one-year term in 2010.

The SPLC said Bond was a "visionary" and "tireless champion" for civil and human rights.

"With Julian's passing, the country has lost one of its most passionate and eloquent voices for the cause of justice," SPLC co-founder Morris Dees said in a statement. "He advocated not just for African Americans, but for every group, indeed every person subject to oppression and discrimination, because he recognized the common humanity in us all."

Bond also served in the Georgia state legislature and was a professor at American University and the University of Virginia.

Harriet Tubman The Life of an African-American Abolitionist by Rob Shone and Anita Ganeri, Illustrated by Rob Shone

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          Born a slave in the United States, Harriet Tubman escaped from bondage to risk her life and newfound liberty in becoming a leading abolitionist in the years before the American Civil War. Tubman surreptitiously led hundreds of escaped Southern slaves to freedom in the North along the Underground Railroad, earning her the nickname "Moses". Through this exciting graphic nonfiction format, readers will learn of Tubman's courage, determination, and iron discipline in this terse retelling of her life story.

Molly Bannaky by Alice McGill, pictures by Chris K. Soentpiet

ON A COLD, GRAY MORNING in 1683, Molly Walsh sat on a stool, tugging at the udder of an obstinate cow. When she spilled the milk, she was brought before the court for stealing. Because she could read, however, Molly escaped the typical punishment of death on the gallows. At the age of seventeen, the English dairymaid was exiled from her country and sentenced to work as an indentured servant in an American colony. Molly worked for a farmer in Maryland for seven long years. Then she was given an ox hitched to a cart, a plow, two hoes, a bag of tobacco seeds, a bag of seed corn, clothing, a gun--and her freedom.

That a lone woman should stake land was unheard of. That she should marry an African slave was even more so. Yet Molly prospered, together with Bannaky turning a one-room cabin in the wilderness into a thriving one-hundred-acre farm. And one day she had the pleasure of writing her new grandson's name in her cherished Bible: Benjamin Banneker. She taught this young boy how to read and write; she told him about his grandfather, a prince from Africa, and about her days as a dairymaid across the ocean in England.

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Throughout his life Banneker was troubled that all blacks were not free. And so, in 1791, he wrote to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who had signed the Declaration of Independence. Banneker attacked the institution of slavery and dared to call Jefferson a hypocrite for owning slaves. Jefferson responded. This is the story of Benjamin Banneker--his science, his politics, his morals, and his extraordinary correspondence with Thomas Jefferson. Illustrated in full-page scratchboard and oil paintings by Caldecott Honor artist Brian Pinkney.

Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice by Phil Hoose

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    Excerpt from the text:

One of them said to the driver in a very angry tone, "Who is it?" The motorman pointed at me. I heard him say, "That's nothing new . . . I've had trouble with that 'thing' before." He called me a "thing." They came to me and stood over me and one said, "Aren't you going to get up?" I said, "No, sir." He shouted "Get up" again. I started crying, but I felt even more defiant. I kept saying over and over, in my high-pitched voice, "It's my constitutional right to sit here as much as that lady. I paid my fare, it's my constitutional right!" I knew I was talking back to a white policeman, but I had had enough.

One cop grabbed one of my hands and his partner grabbed the other and they pulled me straight up out of my seat. My books went flying everywhere. I went limp as a baby—I was too smart to fight back. They started dragging me backwards off the bus. One of them kicked me. I might have scratched one of them because I had long nails, but I sure didn't fight back. I kept screaming over and over, "It's my constitutional right!" I wasn't shouting anything profane—I never swore, not then, not ever. I was shouting out my rights.

It just killed me to leave the bus. I hated to give that white woman my seat when so many black people were standing. I was crying hard. The cops put me in the back of a police car and shut the door. They stood outside and talked to each other for a minute, and then one came back and told me to stick my hands out the open window. He handcuffed me and then pulled the door open and jumped in the backseat with me. I put my knees together and crossed my hands over my lap and started praying.

All ride long they swore at me and ridiculed me. They took turns trying to guess my bra size. They called me "nigger bitch" and cracked jokes about parts of my body. I recited the Lord's Prayer and the Twenty-third Psalm over and over in my head, trying to push back the fear. I assumed they were taking me to juvenile court because I was only fifteen. I was thinking, Now I'm gonna be picking cotton, since that's how they punished juveniles—they put you in a school out in the country where they made you do field work during the day...

A Hubbub of Life Stories from the 900s !

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