The First Strawberries: A Cherokee Story by Joseph Bruchac

I love Native American stories like that in The First Strawberries, by Joseph Bruchac, because they remind readers to appreciate the simple things in life and see the beauty that is all around.  It is a Cherokee tale that has been orally passed down through the ages.  In the story, a husband and wife quarrel and the wife takes off walking.  The husband is very sorry and wants to apologize but he cannot catch up to his wife.  The sun helps him catch up to his wife by tempting her with delicious strawberries that she stops to pick.  When she eats the sweet strawberry she is reminded of how sweet life was with her husband before they quarreled.  The words in this story are very simple but I think this adds to the mood of the story as that of the oral tradition.  The illustrations help the short tale along and the beginning of the book says they are done in “water colors and colored pencils.”  The book was well done but it didn’t “wow” me like other books.
            I have some hesitations about using his book in my classroom and initially wasn’t going to blog about it for this reason.  However, I decided it would be good to get my ideas and feelings out in words.  I would be apprehensive about using this book because it has some obvious religious connotations, such as “the creator made man and woman.”  I’m worried that using this book might lead to a large group discussion about religion.  I know when handled in the right way, conversations like this can go really well but at this point I don’t feel confident enough in how I would handle it.  If I were to use this book, I would introduce it by saying, “We are going to read a story that is very old.  The book is not very old but people use to tell this story using their voices before there were books.  The group of people who gave us this story are a group of people named Native Americans.  You might have heard of them before and they have wonderful stories.  We are very glad they told these stories to each other because now we can enjoy the stories in books.  Native Americans have an idea about where the first strawberries came from.  This does not mean that this is where they came from for sure.  It’s just an idea someone had.  Just like all the stories we read, you may like or dislike it and you may think it is real or not real.”  Obviously this would be a good book to use with a Native American or oral storytelling unit.  I would ask students to share oral stories that they know.  I think this is a good exercise because it allows children to learn about the parts of a story through their own speech.  I would also use this book to talk about apologies.  I would ask the class about how the man apologized and how he felt after he did.  The students could then share their own feelings about apologizing.  I believe it’s always important to include a text-to-self connection as much as possible because they help children remember the lesson of the book. 
Year Published: 1993          Illustrator: Anna Vojtech