Hannah

By Gloria Whelan

First let’s get into the setting:

butter churn

combine

What work gets done on a farm?

How do you get food when the grocery store is a whole day’s trip

away?

School Houses from the 1880s

Vocabulary to think about:

• Every since I learned the new teacher was coming to board with us, I tried to imagine what she would look like.

• I’ll get your trunk from the wagon.

More vocabulary:

• One of Papa’s hands had a finger missing where he got it caught in the combine.

• They threw erasers across the schoolroom and didn’t do their lessons. They even tipped the privy over one night.

Gloria Whelan

• Gloria Whelan is the author of many books; Hannah is just one of them.

• She has a gift for using powerful language and creating mind pictures. Today you’ll hear chapter 1.

Where is this story taking place?

Typhoid fever

“My husband’s father homesteaded here.”

In this case, Hannah’s grandfather lived on this land and farmed it to make money. He had no other source of income other than growing crops and selling anything he had that was extra. That means that almost anything he had, was made by hand or bought with money he earned through trading or selling crops that his family didn’t need to eat in order to stay alive.

Well, I don’t know if you’ll have much time to go walking in the woods or along the lakes, but it is pretty country.

Church in the 1880s

For dessert there was apple pie sweetened with maple sugar from our own sugarbush.

“If it comes to that”, Miss Robbin told me, “all of us have things we don’t see. I would guess, Hannah, that you see some things people with perfectly good eyes don’t.”

Write down in your log what Miss Robbin means at this spot.

Page 16

Hannah

Chapters 3 and 4

Wild Aster

• The flowers were small in my hand. Each one had tiny petals and a center like a little covered button. Their smell was dry and sharp.

milkweed pods

• She put something in my hand that was soft as anything I had ever felt. “There are thousands of soft things like that,” she said, “each one with a seed. They’ll float in the air, and wherever they come down there will be more milkweed plants.”

kerosene lamp

school

slate

Powerful language can also be used when we come to a place in our book that gives a great mind pictures.

Example: I went up the steps with some water.As I went up the steps my water was sloshing in my glass.

Before I could get away the bus moved. Before I could get away the bus lurched forward.

I made friends with Bo Haney and I was going to have a good year.He noticed that the hall wasn’t completely dark. A ray of light came through the window at the end of the hall and made a small yellow patch on the floor at his feet. He was going to live.

Author’s use powerful language to make you, the reader feel more, and have greater understanding about the story in a creative way.

Powerful Language1.used to record new and interesting vocabulary.

Chapter 5Today’s thoughtful log response:

My feelings about [the book, characters] changed when…

Hannah Chapter 5Today while you read chapter 5, think about how your feelings for mama are changing. Respond this way in your “my thinking.”