Ann Cameron's ideas for teachers

[The first sections deal with ideas in general. After that are sections with specific suggestions for Colibrí; Gloria Rising; Gloria's Way;  The Secret Life of Amanda K. Woods;  More Stories Huey Tells;  The Most Beautiful Place in the World;  Julian, Dream Doctor;  Julian, Secret Agent;  Julian's Glorious Summer;  The Kidnapped Prince: The Life of Olaudah Equiano;  The Stories Huey Tells; More Stories Julian Tells;  The Stories Julian Tells. Click on a book title to go directly to it.]

Psychology of characters

One way to use my books in class is to discuss the psychology of the characters: why they do the things they do, what they might do differently, and how something that happens to the characters might resemble something that has happened to young readers.

Questions children are asked in reading texts often have such obvious answers that they bore children to death. While a teacher should make sure the children understand the story, forcing children to answer obvious questions in writing is dreadful. It usually is enough to kill any delight the children may have felt while reading the story. Pru Warren, a media specialist in West Hempstead, N.Y., wrote three excellent questions for the Julian books: How do you know that Julian's and Huey's father loves them so much? What makes him a good father? What makes this a good family?

Connect to children's lives

When you're sure the stories are understood, use them as a springboard for the children's discussion of their own lives. If stories and the related class exercises don't inspire children to think more about their own lives, to dream more, to hope for more, to understand more, and laugh more--then children won't want to read and their language class will be useless. Being forced to talk about things one doesn't want to talk about kills the pleasure of reading and writing.

Be flexible with writing assignments

The questions below about individual books are designed to relate my stories to the children's own lives. Some children, though, don't want to talk about their own lives. For example, they might read a story like "A Day When Frogs Wear Shoes" and be most excited about the fact that Mr. Bates is a car mechanic. Instead of answering written questions about the story, they might want to write about kinds of cars, or how to fix some problem on a car, illustrating the repair with drawings.. This is just fine. Not everybody is dying to be a literary analyst. We ought to encourage and respect the practical talents we see emerging in our students. In language classes it's not important what children write about, as long as they do it with enthusiasm and as much depth as they can manage. They need to discover that writing can serve them.

Turning stories into plays

One of the best things to do with my stories is to take individual chapters of the books and have students turn them into plays. They should feel free to change the dialogue or invent new incidents if they want. They can make scenery, have one person be a narrator and others act as characters. A class could divide into five groups, each group preparing a chapter as a play for the rest of the class, or for children in a younger grade.

Working with drama brings out children's hidden acting talents and their self-confidence, assures that they really understand the story and how the characters feel, assures that they learn to pronounce the dialogue, so that slow readers get a chance to catch up to better readers and perhaps out-perform them. Also it gives all the children a chance to unite body and mind, get out of their chairs and invent gestures and movements to go with the words of the story.

In writing assignments, children might make up stories told from the point of view of Julian, Huey, their friend Gloria, or the character Juan in The Most Beautiful Place in the World.

boys reading by globe


Following are book-by-book discussion suggestions--starting with the latest:

Colibrí

In the classroom Colibrí can be used in the social studies classes because of its authentic use of geography, history, daily life in a different culture, and detailed Mayan customs (both current and historical). Teachers of middle grade students might use it to encourage reflection on the pressures young U.S. teens feel to conform and how they at times resist in order to find their truer selves. Classes in writing might find useful the following description of experiences which led me to write Colibrí and the research I did.

Margarita and Isabela

Writing for me is the process of dreaming a world into being. I don't try to transplant anyone in my "real life" into my fiction. Only after I finished Colibrí did I realize how much my creation of the character Tzunún came from two Mayan sisters, Margarita and Isabela Par, whom I first met when they were five and seven.

Their mother, Candelaria, sold vegetables in the big open-air market a block from my house in Panajachel, the market where everyone for miles arond, ladino and Mayan, comes to buy food and almost all the daily necessities of life. Candelaria had become a market vender out of desperation, I later found out, to liberate herself from life with her alcoholic husband, who sometimes drove a truck, but spent all his earnings on drink. Candelaria had made the break from him successfully, buying vegetables from wholesalers and reselling them retail in Panajachel. She supported her two little girls, Margarita and Isabela, who stayed with her at the market and also ventured off by themselves at times, exploring Panajachel.

Isabela was very outgoing and curious. Margarita was shy and quiet–so quiet in fact that she never spoke. They greeted my husband, Bill, and me on the street, and soon came to visit us often. Especially they liked to sit in our garden and have their pictures taken–and look in our mirrors and see themselves. I could tell that Isabela was smart, and so I asked their mother if she would like me to help pay for Isabela's schooling, and Candelaria said yes.

So Isabela started school–which meant that she had to give up her beautiful hand-woven Mayan corte (skirt) and huipil (blouse) for a sort of Scottish-looking school uniform that was obligatory for her studies. I didn't like the forced ladinization that went with school–putting on the symbols of the Spanish-based dominant culture and giving up, at least on the surface, Mayan ones–but there was no school for Isabela to attend where she could have worn her own clothes. And she didn't seem to mind wearing her school uniform; it was one more new adventure for her. Everything was going well, it seemed, for Candelaria and her children.

Bill and I went to the U.S. to visit our own families for a month. When we got back, we looked in vain for Candelaria in the market. She and the little girls had vanished. I asked around the market and met a 15-year-old cousin of the little girls. She told me what had happened. Candelaria had been pregnant by her alcoholic husband; while we were gone, she'd died in childbirth, along with the baby. Now the two girls were living with their paternal grandmother in the countryside up above Sololá, the next town seven miles and 2,000 feet in altitude away.

I asked the cousin if she'd take me up to see the girls; I hoped I could persuade the grandmother and the father to start both girls in a new school. With the cousin, I set out to find their house, far off the highway on well-trodden paths through fields of corn that formed green walls twelve feet high on either side of us. A peaceful, still, magical landscape high in the mountains. We got to the family compound, a cluster of four small adobe houses with grandma, aunts and uncles, and many children all under the age of ten. This photograph shows most of the children at about that time. Isabela is the third girl from the left in the back row and Margarita is in front of her.

The grandmother didn't speak any Spanish at all, only Kaqchikel. The other children in the family didn't speak Spanish either, and none were in school. But the girls' father, though intoxicated, was clear about one thing: yes, he'd like the girls to go to school. So began a closer relationship with Isabela and Margarita that so far has lasted ten years. Now both of them have gone far beyond the usual three years of schooling for Mayan girls; they're in high school at Catholic boarding schools where they've won scholarships and are looking forward to careers.

But when I began to help them, both were suffering a lot from the loss of their mother. Margarita especially had problems: she and the family didn't believe she could talk, and someone else always talked for her. If she wanted to say something herself, she had to go through a ritual of striking her body with her fists to be able to overcome her inhibitions about speaking. I took her to a doctor who said, just as I thought, that there was nothing physically wrong with Margarita that prevented her speaking, and I managed to convince the family not to speak for her, but to give her time to speak for herself. What helped most, though, was school, where her severe stammer vanished when she sang and recited poetry; and where her ability to make friends in spite of the stammer made it possible for her to overcome it.

Her father at first had a job driving a truck in Guatemala City, but later on drank so heavily that he couldn't leave home–where his brothers supplied him with alcohol. The grandmother said Margarita should stay home from school to take care of the father, "so that he wouldn't die."

I told Margarita that she had to go to school, that if her father continued to drink so heavily, he would die, and there was nothing that she could do to prevent it, and it would not be her fault, she had to leave him, go on and learn and make a success of her own life. The grandmother then permitted Margarita to go back to school. When, after one long Easter drinking spree, he did indeed die, I don't think that Margarita felt she was guilty for his death. I'm not so sure about Isabela.

It was partly from Margarita and Isabela's father that I came up with the character of Uncle–particularly from one incident. Both girls had developed contagious warts, but we only realized Isabela had them. We took Isabela to a dermatologist in Guatemala City, a two-hour drive from Panajachel, and he removed her warts. Then when Margarita showed us her warts, we planned to take her. But her father intervened–told Margarita that he could remove her warts without all that fancy doctoring. He took the warts off her arm with an application of battery acid. Which worked, but left raised scars on her arm where the warts had been, larger than the warts themselves. I told Margarita her father had tried to help but had made a mistake.

The character of Uncle in Colibrí turns out to be considerably worse than Margarita's and Isabela's father, who could be affectionate even though he did almost nothing for his children.

Sometimes a particular experience becomes kind of a keynote for a character, though–sets the tone, you could say, for all the things he does. The wart removal incident became a keynote for the creation of the character of Uncle, an event that for me crystallized into a concept I thought of as "concerned neglect" or "neglectful concern." An intermittent, careless concern that may not be better than outright abandonment.

Also, well after I had made Tzunún a child with terrible problems speaking, I realized I'd found that theme through Margarita. Most of all, though, she and her sister influenced the book through all that they told me about their rural life, their thoughts, their hopes their joys and sorrows over many years.

While I was engaged in helping them, a wise Mexican friend, a surgeon, told me that one only truly helps people when one contributes to building their autonomy and independence. I attempted to do that with the girls, and now, as I see their triumphs in school and how they are making their way without my aid, I think I've succeeded. One incident sticks in my mind, though, as unforgettable. With autonomy and independence in mind, I told the girls when they were fourteen and twelve, that they needed to figure out a way to start earning some money for themselves. Why didn't they plant flowers around their grandmother's house, flowers they could sell to other families to adorn graves in the cemetery as is the custom on November 1, the Day of the Dead? They said they'd like to do that, and I provided them with lots of flower seeds, which they planted.

I was away in the U.S. that year in October and the beginning of November, but when I returned to Guatemala, I asked them about the flower project. How had it turned out? Yes, they said, they'd grown lots of flowers–but they hadn't sold any–for the Day of the Dead they'd harvested them all and taken them to adorn their mother's grave.

A practical friend told me later that I could have responded that putting some flowers on their mother's grave and selling the rest would have been a better idea. But I couldn't have said it then even if I'd thought of it. And I know I couldn't say it even now. What they did was right, and never mind business.

Francisco, the One-Eyed Boy

Until very recently, I've written all my books in restaurants–most of them in one restaurant in Panajachel, the Patio Restaurant, where I'd sit with coffee and ice cream, or sometimes a cuba libre and a plate of spaghetti, and then take out my writing notebook and go to work.

Panajachel, with a population around 14,000, is a tourist town, and the streets are crowded with kids selling souvenirs–jewelry, handwoven bracelets, dolls. One day as I sat with my notebook at the Patio, a boy about nine came up and started talking to me. He was an attractive child, except for one eye, which had the muddy look of a dried-up puddle. The eye looked hopeless to me, but I thought he should see a doctor about it if he hadn't. I asked him if he'd like to, and he said yes. So I told him to come up to my house with a parent and we could talk about his going to an eye doctor.

A day or so later he and his father visited me, and I gave them money so they could travel by bus to an eye clinic forty miles away. When they returned, they came to tell me what had happened. Francisco said: "The doctor put his instrument to my bad eye–and for the first time since the accident, I could see!" It was wonderful to see his smile, the radiant delight in his face.

"Yes," Francisco's father said, "and the doctor made an appointment for us to come back in August when he'll operate on Francisco's eye." The father was a burly guy, who seemed at the point to lean toward me and fill our living room. "And we'll need money for that–two nights for hotel, because Francisco will have to be there early before the operation and stay on a day after before he can travel; and then there's bus fare, and meals, and medicines, and the cost of the operation itself..." It was clear he wanted me to provide funds for all this, and I said I would.

They left me with the crumpled receipts for the expenditures for the first visit to the doctor. But once they were gone, I wondered–there had been something almost predatory in the way Francisco's father had leaned toward me, totting up all the next round of medical expenses ... I took a receipt which had the clinic's phone number on it, and called the eye dctor.

Yes, he said, Francisco Chopén and his father had come to see him. But it wasn't true what Francisco had said about his eye. He'd been able to see nothing through the doctor's instruments. That eye, which had been injured when he was four with a spatter of hot fat from a cooking fire, would never see again; and there was no new appointment for any operation of any kind, no appointment even for a checkup. Any further consultaton was useless.

A few days later, Francisco came to see me, alone. I told him I knew he'd lied to me, but that we could still be friends if he'd be honest. He said he would. He returned again a day later, asking for money to buy rubber boots for the rainy season. He could get them right down the street at the market, he said. I gave him the money, telling him to come right back and show me the boots. But he didn't come back till two days later, when he still hadn't bought the boots. There hadn't been any boots in the market he said, which I knew wasn't true. I got angry and told him he was lying to me, told him to leave and never darken my door again. And he never did. The father vanished from my life, too.

When I told Miguel Cacrúm, a good Mayan friend, about the Chopéns, he sighed and said I should have consulted him before I parted with my money. "That Francisco's father is a bad man. He can work as a bricklayer, and sometimes does. But every weekend he goes up to the Sololá market and sets up as a beggar, robbing people poorer than himself, pretending to be blind."

I couldn't get Francisco out of my mind–nor my own naiveté and vanity in thinking that a boy told by his father to extract money could ignore his father and through my influence become honest overnight. Also, I couldn't forget what I thought must have been Francisco's pain at pretending that he could see through his lost eye. Another Mayan friend, Rosa Queché, a very smart woman whose formal schooling was just three weeks of kindergarten , told me I didn't need to feel so bad for Francisco. "He's morally handicapped," she said. "And that's just like any physical handicap: one becomes used to it, lives with it, and after awhile, it doesn't hurt anymore. Francisco isn't suffering from his handicap."

Nevertheless I couldn't forget the vanished Francisco, such a personable, really lovely boy who'd never escape his father's fatal influence. I began to think of writing a novel about a child under a similar influence who somehow could separate himself or herself from such a father figure. How could it be done? What would be the steps to a regained purity of perception? In the end, Francisco's father became Uncle and Francisco, for whom I had no hope, became the embodiment of hope, Tzunún.

Research Before Writing

Guatemala is a country where most people are poor and must work very hard to survive. Most Guatemalans are Mayan, descendants of a civiliation that's thousands of years old. Often Mayan people use their dreams to guide their lives. They believe in magic and miracles, and sometimes the magic and the miracles are real.

I tried to capture the very special atmosphere of Guatemala in Colibrí. It took me almost two years to write, drawing always on my twenty years of living here, and doing a lot of research. I used aspects of real people that I know, and actual locations. The story involves an ancient Mayan treasure hidden in a cave--so I crawled around in caves, including one where an ancient Mayan treasure had been found.

In Colibrí there's a Mayan woman who cures people with wild plants of Guatemala. So I got to know naturistas--people who cure with plants. To help me, one Mayan naturista went around his yard, pulling up plants and telling me what sicknesses they cured. I wrote the plants' names on the leaves he gave me. Was I ever dismayed when the leaves wilted and my writing disappeared! Fortunately, I also had notes on paper.

One major, mysterious character befriends Tzunún--Doña Celestina Tuc, a calendar diviner, a person who uses an ancient Mayan calendar to read the future in little red seeds laid out on a table. To write that part of the book, I visited three calendar diviners: two did a reading of the little red seeds for me. One read the seeds when I thought my book was almost finished. She told me it wasn't done--that I had a lot of work and more research ahead of me. She was right--it took another year before I finished Colibrí and, I hope, captured some of the magic of Guatemala.

When I'm writing I like to have mental images of characters. This man, whom I saw begging outside a church, became my mental image of Uncle. But Uncle might not have thought of him as a "true professional:" his blindness is unconvincing.

Guatemala is a country with a tremendous number of different ideas on the subject of religion and God and gods. Most Mayans converted to Christianity soon after the Spanish came in the early 1500s. Some retained their Mayan beliefs. Through all those years the two sets of beliefs affected each other so that nowadays some people follow both Christian and Mayan ideas. Wandering around the country Tzunún would have heard many different points of view and wouldn't have gotten any instruction from Uncle about which is to be believed. Actually, at the end of the book, when she thinks about the warriors who turned into hummingbirds when they died in battle, she's expressing what was a belief among the Aztecs and other Nahuatl-speaking people of Mexico. During the time of the Spanish Conquest, many Nahuatl-speaking people came to Guatemala with the Spanish and some stayed on. So it's quite likely that the ancient Mexican belief in the hummingbird as the warrior spirit still lives in parts of the Guatemalan highlands.

Guatemala holds the dubious honor of having the highest per-capita number of foreign adoptions in the world. Adoptive parents pay up to $30,000 to arrange adoptions. That attracts criminals, so sometimes children are kidnapped and sold into adoption; as many as 15 child kidnappings are reported each month. The government fights this evil and on occasion the newspapers have stories of clandestine baby nurseries being discovered or of DNA testing resulting a baby being returned to the mother. The U.S. Embassy requires DNA testing as well as face-to-face interviews with the natural mother before issuing a visa to the baby. Spain, Canada and the Netherlands will not approve adoptions from Guatemala. The vast majority of the adoptions are legal. Most U.S. adoptive parents have met the biological parents of the children they adopt and are rightly sure about the legitimacy of the adoption. In the event Guatemalan adopted children are in your school, I think this subject should be handled with great care.

I came to Guatemala for the first time in 1983 to visit a good friend, with the idea of staying if I thought I could become a part of the society, not just a tourist. I always wanted to see the world through other eyes, not to be entirely caught in the box of my own culture. Probably I don't see things exactly as I would if I'd stayed in the U.S.; but what also happened from being here was a greater appreciation than ever of the strengths of my own culture. I don't like the word "expatriate" which sounds a lot like "ex-patriot." I'm an American citizen and I'd never give up my birth country. I pay U.S. taxes, I vote for the President and Senators and members of Congress, and I'm passionately concerned about American politics and society and our future as a nation. I've become very involved with my town in Guatemala and its people and progress, too--but the good things that I can bring to it are very much a result of my heritage and ideals as an American.

Colibrí is based on twenty years of experience living among the Mayan people. It presents Guatemala as it is today, regaining its spirit and its economy after thirty years of civil war and domination by the Guatemalan army. Every detail of customs and beliefs was checked with Mayan sources. The wartime massacre described briefly in the book is one that actually took place at a plantation called "La Hortensia," near Nebaj, Guatemala. Major events of the book–a child kidnapping and the theft of a statue from a church–are unfortunately frequent happenings here and are a common topic of articles in Guatemalan newspapers. All the places in the book are real, though some names and locations are changed. The place described as "Two Rivers" is in a Guatemalan national park, "Semuc Champey." "San Sebastián" resembles the town where I live, Panajachel.

What I cared most to capture in the book, though, is the reality that newspapers and maps can't express: the courage and generosity of Guatemalan people, and the way faith, mystery, magic and dream is a vital part of their lives. The novel is an adventure story, but most of all it's a study in identity formation and the development of autonomy in a girl--a young girl becoming a teenager and learning to take upon herself the responsibility for who she is and becomes. This is a universal experience of both sexes, and I think will be very meaningful to middle school readers, who will see themselves in Tzunún, even though their own outward circumstances are very different. Tzunún struggles first not to violate, then to develop and express her moral center.

If you want to learn how to pronounce Mayan and Spanish words in the text, click here.

If you want further reading on Guatemala, the Mayans, and other subjects covered in this novel, click here.

If you would like to see two newspaper clippings showing kidnapped babies recovered by the police, click here.

If you've finished reading the book and have questions or comments about it, click here and let me know by email. Top of Page

Gloria Rising

Have you ever had a time when you told the truth and someone didn't believe you? How did you feel and what did you do about it?

Have you ever felt caught in a fear-ball?

Why do you think Billy is doing mean things? Could his parents divorcing have anything to do with that?

Have you ever wanted to keep something special that's very important to you, even if nobody else could understand why, the way Gloria keeps her onion? What was your special thing, and why was it important? Did you keep it? Do you still have it? Or what happened to it? Is it still important to you?

The astronaut Grace Street talks about daring to do the things you care about. Is there something you really want to do that seems that it might be too big of a challenge? What is it? Do you think there are any steps you could take to get ready to do it? Top of Page

Gloria's Way

Make a poem from newspapers the way Gloria does. Julian and Huey's dad advises her "not to let a parrot's mind mess up your mind." Do you know any Gloria and Hueypeople that mess up other people's minds--just like that parrot? How can we deal with people who want to "mess up our minds"? Why does Latisha try to get her new friends to eat her apple pie? Does Latisha have trouble letting her new friends know that she is angry? What could she have said to communicate with them better? What does Mr. Bates think of the idea of just letting somebody getting away with acting a little bit mean? Do you think he is right? Why does Gloria's mother advise her not to ask Julian if he likes her or Latisha best? Do you think her mother is right? Julian believes that everyone needs to have some secrets. Do you think that's true? Do you ever feel your parents don't have enough time for you? Do you think there's anything you could do about it? Gloria's dad thinks he might solve his work problem better if he didn't keep pushing at it so hard. Do you ever solve a problem better after relaxing a little? Top of Page

The Secret Life of Amanda K. Woods

What do children think about Margaret's philosophy about "circulating"? What do they think of Amanda's idea that great people, like the Lone Ranger, get people to do what they want without having to persuade them? Amanda is very concerned about not being phony--but then she takes a photo of her sister's to send to her French pen pal as if it's her own. Why is it hard for people to show their real selves to others? Has it ever been difficult for you? Amanda tries to get her father to talk to her. Why do you think parents sometimes are closed off from their children, like Amanda's father? Margaret changes a lot in the book. What changes do you see in her, and what do you think are the causes? Amanda changes a lot, too. How would you describe the changes in her? Top of Page

More Stories Huey Tells

Have you ever been sad, like Huey is over his sunflowers, when someone or something in your life died? How did you get over your Sunflowersadness? Have you ever figured out a clever way to keep a brother or sister or sister from taking advantage of you--the way Julian tried to take advantage of Huey by hogging his new basketball? Why is it so hard for Huey's dad to give up cigarettes? Do you know any adult who suffers from an addiction? What does that person say about his addiction? Do you think Mr. Bates is right when he says that Huey and Julian are stealing when they flushed his cigarettes down the toilet? Did you ever feel like a failure when an adult didn't keep a promise to you? Do you think there's any way to get over that feeling? What would you take with you if you made a very long journey into space? Why would you choose those particular things to take along? What would you most like to see in outer space? Describe going to really see it. Huey says he's 15 billion years old, and he would say that you are, too. Why? How does it feel to be 15 billion years old? Can you imagine some of the things the atoms in your body have known during the past 15 billion years? In the story "The Treasure," Huey ends up alone down in the bottom of the mine because he's scared to admit he's scared. Have you ever gotten into a situation like that? How did you get out of it? What happened that made it possible for Mr. Bates to give up cigarettes? What do you feel your own biggest "treasures" are, and why? Top of Page

The Most Beautiful Place in the World

Since this novel deals with a child's mother abandoning her son, it can be hard for children emotionally. It's a good idea to talk about how young Juan's mother might be. People often marry early in Guatemala. Young readers should know that perhaps Juan's mother was only 14 when he was born. Do they think fourteen-year-olds are ready to be responsible parents? Do they think her youth gives Juan's mother some excuse for her actions? How would they feel if they were separated from their parents? They might wish to take the parts of characters in the book and write additional scenes for the characters. What would Juan say to his mother if he confronted her about his leaving him? What would she say? What would Juan's grandmother tell his mother? Children might like making up a dialogue where the things Juan says to his mother are so convincing that she leaves the stepfather and comes back home. How does poverty affect the characters in the book? What role does poverty play in their decisions? What do the students think causes poverty in a society or in a family? The recipe for Arroz con Leche is found by a click here. Top of Page

Julian, Dream Doctor

Do children think their own parents might ever be afraid of something the way Julian's and Huey's father fears snakes? Children might ask their parents and find out. Do they themselves have any fears that they've overcome or would like to overcome? They might write their own stories about a birthday present that turns out to be the opposite of what someone wants. Top of Page

Julian, Secret Agent

Would the students like to trap a criminal, as Julian, Huey and Gloria try to do? Do they have any ideas about ways to do detective work, or how they could trap a criminal? The Food Wizard has all kinds of strange names for the food he cooks. Can the children think of new names for other things they eat? Top of Page

Julian's Glorious Summer

How do the responsibilities Julian's dad gives him show that his dad loves Julian? Did his dad teach Julian any important lessons in this Mr. Batesbook? Did your students have a hard time or any scarey moments learning to ride a bicycle? What made it hard or scarey? One important part of learning to write stories is learning to stretch or compress time. In a story, two years can pass in two seconds, or something that happened in ten seconds can take many minutes to tell about. Have the children "stretch time" in telling what happened in their scariest moment of learning to ride a bike. If nothing scarey happened, they can make something up. Top of Page

The Kidnapped Prince: The Life of Olaudah Equiano

Why was learning to read so important for Olaudah? What surprised you most about the things that happened to him? About the things you learned about slavery from reading the book? If you have been a slave, what about it would have hurt you the most? Why did people want to own slaves? How did the slave owners justify slavery, and how does Olaudah's life story prove that their justifications were false? At some points in the story, people who have been kind to Olaudah betray him? Why? Do you think people can be changed by greed? Why is it important that human beings have rights that their countries enforce? Do you think the world will ever be a place where everyone's rights will be respected? Is there anything we can do to help ensure that people are treated fairly? For instance, a lot of children in foreign countries suffer the virtual slavery of child labor, making goods that are sent to the USA for sale. Are there ways we can help them? How did Olaudah find the strength to endure so many hardships? Where do you find the strength to endure hardships? Top of Page

The Stories Huey Tells

Do you have bad dreams? What are they about? Huey says Julian "nothings" his bad dream. What does he mean by that? Can you think of times when somebody's "nothinged" worries you have? Have you ever done it to someone else? Why do you think people "nothing" other people? Did you ever get angry at your family and feel like leaving home? What happened? Do you think the family rule about eating everything in restaurants is a good rule? Is there anything good about it? Is there anything bad about having that kind of a rule? Did you ever Huey eats Banana Spaghettimake something special, the way Huey makes Banana Spaghetti, and have it not work out? Do you think it's worth trying new things anyway? Have you done anything special for your family that did work out? Are there things you keep to yourself--the way Huey doesn't tell his family the secret of where the animal tracks come from? Would you rather tell things or keep them to yourself? Do you like to observe wild animals, the way Huey, Julian and Gloria want to do? Are there animals you can see near where you live? If there aren't, can you watch animals at the zoo? Find an animal to observe and write about all the things it does. Top of Page

More Stories Julian Tells

Was there ever a time when you were scared to tell your parents something--the way Julian and Huey are scared to tell their parents Frogs wearing shoesthey're bored? Did you tell your parents in the end? How did they react? Do you ever feel like Julian, that you wanted "to beat someone at something"? Do you make up bets or challenges when you feel like that? Julian's dad tells Julian that he's still learning to be a good father. How should a good father act? What does Julian's father do that makes him a good father? Are there things he does that make him not such a good father? How do you want to act toward your children if you become a father or mother? Pretend you found Julian's bottle in a strange country or right near where you live, and write to him. Top of Page

The Stories Julian Tells

Do you think the way Julian's father describes the pudding makes it Mr. Bates finds Julian and Huey under the bedeven more tempting to the boys? Write a tempting, mysterious description of some food you like. Make up a story about an invisible animal that helps people, the way catalog cats do. Why would a tree die if it didn't have any leaves? What kind of plants would you like to have in a garden? Were you scared when you first lost a tooth? How did it come out? Why do you think Julian's dad makes up so many scarey ways to help Julian lose his tooth? Are there ever times for you when fears are more fun and exciting than really scarey? How did you meet your first friend? What happened that caused you to be friends? The recipe for a Pudding Like a Night on the Sea is reached by a click here. Top of Page

Additional teachers guides to some of my books can be found here.

I would appreciate any additional tips you might wish to offer. Write me by clicking here and I'll add them to this page.

The color illustrations are from editions of my books in France and Great Britain. The pictures of Gloria and Huey, the Sun, Mr. Bates carrying a box, and frogs wearing shoes are from Le petit frère de Julien, published by Editions Gallimard, illustrations Copyright© by Ann Strugnell; Julian and Huey under the bed from Histories de Julien, published by Editions Gallimard, illustrations Copyright © 1981 by Ann Strugnell; and Huey eating spaghetti from Banana Spaghetti, published by Victor Gollancz, illustrations Copyright © 1995 and 1997 by Liz Toft.


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