They Were Strong and Good

Written and Illustrated by Robert Lawson

Key Scripture:
(Genesis 12:1-3 NNAS) Now the LORD said to Abram, "Go forth from your country, And from your relatives And from your father's house, To the land which I will show you; And I will make you a great nation, And I will bless you, And make your name great; And so you shall be a blessing; And I will bless those who bless you, And the one who curses you I will curse. And in you all the families of the earth will be blessed."

In this Caldecott award-winning book, Robert Lawson introduced us to his parents and grandparents and demonstrated his pride in them by telling us their stories and encouraging us to remember our own ancestors. This was a perfect book for us to study while Grandpa Lathem was visiting us, as he was able to share his interest and expertise in genealogy with us.

We began by looking at how God is the Originator of families and how families play an important role all throughout the Bible. We specifically saw how God promised Abram that through him & his descendants, all families of the earth would be blessed, and how this was fulfilled in Jesus. This was an important touch-point for us to which we would return later in the year when we did our Jesse Tree study - looking at the "family tree" of Jesus.

We made a list of several families in the Bible and then also made some lists of various members of our family by category: cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents. To help us in learning some of the less familiar terms that are sometimes used in discussing extended family relationships we used the book Who's Who in My Family (by Loreen Leedy). This book also helped us as we created a poster of our family tree which we took back to the level of great-grandparents. While we worked on our poster, Grandpa Lathem and Dad worked on a computerized version of the family tree, including photos. Once both versions were completed, it really helped the kids to gain a grasp of the relationships involved.

In keeping with the style and theme of the book, I had requested in advance that each of the grandparents write down a short version of their own story to share with the kids. It was interesting and enlightening to read each person's story from his or her own perspective and note how the level of detail and the focus was different from person to person - similar to the way Lawson presented his own ancestors. As a follow-up to reading the grandparents' stories, I helped Claire write a brief story of her own life, complete with portrait. We also gave each of the grandparents one of those "Memory" type books for Christmas in the hopes of gaining some additional written records of their lives and families. And although we did not delve this deeply with the children at this point, it was a real blessing for me to look back over the family history information that both of my grandmothers had recorded during the later years of their lives, as well as the information amassed and recorded by Grandpa Lathem and by my Aunt Beulah. What a treasure!

Our geography lesson for this book took us to several states as well as the United Kingdom, the Caribbean, and the Netherlands. We placed our story disc on New York as that was the place where the author's parents had met and it also figured into other parts of the story.

In the areas of science & math we took a brief look at bees and beekeeping, really enjoying the Magic School Bus video & book on this topic as well as a few other books about bees. We colored bees and learned to draw them and used one of our large hexagonal lacing buttons to help us draw the honeycomb shape. We also had fun doing mazes featuring bees.

Two other supplements for this book that demonstrated similarity of theme were the following: the Reading Rainbow episode featuring The Ox Cart Man and the book Homeplace (by Ann Shelby).