Pandemic Library, Episode 8: Thoreau for Fifth Graders

Fifth graders are reading My Side of the Mountain now, as they do every spring. and Mrs. Bestor  invited some other teachers to read various chapters out loud and to provide some links to other videos, web pages, and so on that would connect to the chapter that the teacher read. Mrs. Bestor suggested I film a bird walk in the Lee Metcalf National Wildlife Refuge, which I did.

It was fun and easy: walk around a bit, videoing whatever caught my eye, and talking about it. We got to see an owlet and its mom. Easy as you please.

Then Mrs. Bestor suggested, in an "It's-no-big-deal-it-won't-take-long" kind of way, that I do a video about Thoreau. Henry David Thoreau, who wrote a famous book about some time he spent in the woods. Thoreau, the name a lost English professor calls Sam.

Thoreau's book, Walden, is famous and very much worth reading, but it is also a big, dense, sometimes slow moving book about nature, philosophy, and the nature of reality. Although Thoreau did not have fifth graders in mind when he wrote the book, it's worth knowing a little bit about his work.

I hope you read at least parts of Walden some day. Until then, you can watch the brief Adobe Spark presentation I put together yesterday.

Here's the link: Thoreau for Fifth Graders