John Paul George & Ben

Written and Illustrated by Lane Smith. Smith has a popular publishing reputation putting interesting spins to well known stories. He grew up in California but returned to his birth place of Oklahoma every summer of his childhood. He is now a famous illustrator and lives in New York City. To find out more click here.

Genre: Fiction
Theme: History/American Revolution
Ages: 6 - 10

Summary:  This book has many sections, each beginning with an characteristic trait or adjective to describe the founding fathers and other historical men from the American Revolution him period. There is some truth in each story, but mainly funny and silly stories about these figures during their childhoods.




Link to Picture

Pre-Reading Activity:  This text is a good way to kick off a history unit on the American Revolution. Start a discussion with the students about important people they know with the first name John, Paul, George, and or Ben.  As students guess correctly they will notice a trend in the names being presidents of from Colonial times.

Post-Reading Activity: At the end of the text there is a page with true or false facts.  Taking liberties with the facts is something that happens in the text.  Using this page to have the class vote for true or false for each statement.   Have a conversation about that even though it is fun to take liberties to make silly stories we need to stress the importance of truth and facts for accuracy.

Reflection:  What is so nice about this book is that it makes history less serious and heavily fact laden.  It makes history funny, it would be great to compare with actual facts.  At the nearly the end of the book there are descriptions with more historical fact to explain why the adjective previously used to describe them is a good choice.