Module 4: Thimble Summer

Goodreads. (2016). Thimble summer.
Retrieved from https://www.goodreads.
com/book/show/854764.Thimble_Summer

Newbery Winner in 1939

Book Summary: One summer, Garnet, while swimming with her brother in the creek, finds a silver thimble that she believes in magic. Indeed, she ends up having the best summer with lots of good things happening, that it must be magic! The drought ends as rain pours over their farm. Her family gets a loan to build a new barn to replace the lopsided one. Eric, a homeless-yet-hard-working boy, joins their family and is a delightful third brother for Garnet. She goes on adventures by herself like hitchhiking to New Conniston. And her piglet, Timmy, wins a prize at the fair. What a summer!

APA Reference: Enright, E. (1938). Thimble summer. New York City: A Yearling Book.

Impressions: Thimble Summer is a well-written farm story for elementary readers. It is told from a limited, third-person point of view, and is appropriate cognitively and has a good balance of adventure and parental role modeling to appeal to kids without overwhelming didacticism.

Professional Review: Staff. (1938, August 1). Thimble summer [book review of Thimble Summer]. Kirkus Reviews. Retrieved from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/elizabeth-enright/thimble-summer/ I liked this story of the events through the summer  months on a Wisconsin farm, events with enough element of surprise and adventure and yet sound in content and with a good deal about the round of activities, -- barn raising, threshing, etc. The title comes from the feeling on the part of the small heroine that her finding of the thimble  had brought luck to the farm.

Library Use: Thimble Summer can be one book in a lit circle group of books on growing up on the prairie/as a pioneer for social studies classrooms. Other books in this lit circle’s choices include Sarah, Plain and Tall; Prairie Whispers; Nothing Here But Trees; Little House on the Prairie; Black Storm Comin’; and Stop the Train!. This is just one lit circle grouping of books available as a teacher resource to promote cross-curricular literacy.