If You Spent a Day With Thoreau at Walden Pond

PreS-Gr 2– In 1845, at age 28, Thoreau built a tiny cabin in the woods beside Walden Pond outside the town of Concord, Massachusetts. He lived there for two years, noting in a journal his observations of the animals, plants, and seasonal changes. His book, Walden, condenses his experience into one year spent communing with nature. Here, Burleigh has simplified Thoreau’s life at Walden Pond to a short description of one day’s activities as heard through the voice of a narrator and seen through the eyes of a modern young boy dressed in blue jeans, T-shirt, and running shoes. “Henry has just what he needs,” says the narrator, as the child gazes into the sparsely furnished cabin.  As Henry and his young friend drink cold pond water, watch darting fish from a rowboat, weed Henry’s bean patch, and listen to bird calls on a walk in the woods, Thoreau uses “teachable moments” to enrich each experience, as he did with the students in his school. Two pages of brief facts about his life and a page of his thoughts on simple living are appended. Minor’s impressionist/realistic gouache paintings are filled with the rich blues of sky and water, textured forest greens, and warm browns of cabin, earth, and tree trunks. In D. B. Johnson’s Henry Builds a Cabin (Houghton, 2002)– a charming fictionalized story for the same age group featuring bear characters–Thoreau visualizes his tiny cabin as a spacious home. Burleigh’s more serious, though somewhat fictionalized, presentation (due to the boy’s presence) offers a glimpse of Thoreau’s philosophy that young children can understand.–Susan Scheps, formerly at Shaker Heights Public Library,  OH