Bluish by Virginia Hamilton






About the Author:
Virginia Hamilton was born in 1936 and grew up in Yellow Springs, Ohio. Her grandfather, Levi Perry, fled slavery via the Underground Railroad, when he came to Ohio. After Ms. Hamilton graduated from Antioch College, she moved to New York City where she met the love of her life, Arnold Adoff. They were married in 1960, and moved back to Yellow Springs in 1975, where they lived until her death in 2002.

Virginia Hamilton received almost every award given for children's literature: the Hans Christian Anderson Medal, the John Newbery Medal, the Laura Ingalls Wilder Medal, the Coretta Scott King Award, the Boston Globe--Horn Book Award, the Edgar Allen Poe Award, the Regina Medal, and the Ohioana Award. She was the first writer of children's literature to receive a MacArthur Fellowship, and three of her books won the title of Newbery Honor Books.

I wanted to study some of Virginia Hamilton's work because she was my neighbor; her large extended family still ilve all over town, and her husband is a dear friend of mine. I had the opportunity to get to know Virginia because she gave so freely of herself and her books at the library and book stores in town. My daughter loved to read from an early age, and Virginia would often attend the "Brown Bag Book Bunch" meetings the Yellow Springs library held for children at lunchtime on Saturdays. She gave my daughter a signed copy of Bluish at one of these meetings.

Content Standards:
Grade Eight
Writing Applications
1. Write narratives that:
b. Use literary devices to enhance style and tone; and
c. Create complex characters in a definite, believable setting.

Activity:
This book is written at a 5th/6th grade level, so it would be a good choice for some of my 8th grade students with learning disabilities. Students would read the book or listen to the audio book, or we could read it together. We would spend time talking about how Virginia Hamilton developed the different characters and gave them voices.

The first and then every few chapters or so consist of a journal entry by the main character, Dreenie. She tells about a young African American girl in her school who has cancer and is very different from the other students. her skin is translucent and has a bluish tint, and everyone calls her Bluish. She wears a blue knit hat that she made. The other chapters are written in third person, showing the perspective of other characters, too.

My 8th grade students will have discussions about how an author decides what voice or voices will be used in the book, what research needs to be done, what type of language will be used. We'll talk about the characters and how the author develops them during the course of the book. For instance, in Bluish, Dreenie is a young African American girl in an inner city school. In the journal portions, she talks like she would be that girl: "Never seen anyone like her. Up close." We would also talk about how Virginia Hamilton wrote in the front of the book about the fifth grade at PS 290, Manhattan New School in New York City, who helped her with research for the book and served as her inspiration. That helped Ms. Hamilton know where she wanted to go with the book.

After we've read the book and had these discussions, students will write a short story using a voice other than their own, something totally new for them.