How I Learned Geography

by Uri Shulevitz

Overview

Having fled from war in their troubled homeland, a boy and his family are living in poverty in a strange country. Food is scarce, so when the boy's father brings home a map instead of bread for supper, at first the boy is furious. But when the map is hung on the wall, it floods their cheerless room with color. As the boy studies its every detail, he is transported to exotic places without ever leaving the room, and he eventually comes to realize that the map feeds him in a way that bread never could.

The award-winning artist's most personal work to date is based on his childhood memories of World War II and features stunning illustrations that celebrate the power of imagination. An author's note includes a brief description of his family's experience, two of his early drawings, and the only surviving photograph of himself from that time.
How I Learned Geography is a 2009 Caldecott Honor Book and a 2009 Bank Street - Best Children's Book of the Year.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780374334994
Publisher:	Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Publication date:	04/01/2008
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	32
Sales rank:	201,018
Product dimensions:	10.30(w) x 10.27(h) x 0.40(d)
Lexile:	AD660L (what's this?)
Age Range:	4 - 8 Years

About the Author

Uri Shulevitz is a Caldecott Medal-winning illustrator and author. He has written and illustrated many celebrated children's books, including the Caldecott Medal-winner The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship, written by Arthur Ransome. He has also earned three Caldecott Honors, for The Treasure, Snow, and How I Learned Geography.

Reading Group Guide

Author/illustrator Uri Shulevitz spent the early years of his life, from the age of four, wandering with his family, in search of a home. From war-torn Warsaw, Poland to the Central Asian city of
Turkestan in the Soviet Union to Paris, France to Tel Aviv, Israel, and finally to his permanent home in New York City.

Likewise, many of the characters in his books travel too. The Fool of the World sets off in search of a flying ship. The young boy in How I Learned Geography uses a map and his imagination to travel the world. Benjamin of Tudela journeys for fourteen years to the far reaches of the known world and back again to Spain. In The Treasure, Isaac travels great distances to the Royal Palace in search of a treasure that he finally finds under his own stove. And the young hero of When I Wore My
Sailor Suit sets off on an imaginary journey to distant lands as the captain of a sailing ship on both calm and storm tossed seas.

Opportunities abound for social studies curriculum connections as well as language arts (reading,
writing, and research) and visual art connections. Invite your students to join you on a journey of fun, learning, and imagination!

SOCIAL STUDIES: Mapping

Mapping a Course

Two of Uri Shulevitz's books include maps that are essential to the understanding of the story. Begin by sharing classroom maps, including those found in atlases. After students have studied several maps, brainstorm the definition of a map (a "picture" or graphic representation of some or all of the earth's surface, including bodies of water, using lines, symbols, color, and labels, and drawn to scale as one might see them from above) and its purpose, guiding students in their understanding.

Read How I Learned Geography and The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela aloud to your students. Discuss the similarities and differences in the map Shulevitz paints in each book, recording responses on a Venn diagram. Be sure to notice the geographic area pictured in each book as well as the labels, colors, and symbols each map employs.

Ask students to notice the ways in which the maps are similar. Then ask students to discuss why the maps are different. What purpose do the maps serve in each story?

Extension Activity: Using a document camera, project the image of one of the maps from How I Learned Geography onto a white board. Then, challenge students, using atlases or flat maps as references, to label each country pictured on the map.

A Map Makes the Adventure

As the narrator of How I Learned Geography studies the map his father hangs on the wall, he becomes fascinated by the places represented there and is transported to many imagined places. Challenge students to attach each of these imagined places to at least one place on the map pictured in the book. Note that the final illustration spread will help students to locate some of these places on a map of Asia:

Burning deserts Sandy beaches Snowy mountains with icy winds Wondrous temples with colorful birds on the roof Fruit groves with tropical fruits Fresh water streams flowing near palm trees Large city with tall buildings

LANGUAGE ARTS: Writing Literacy

What's in a Name?

The young narrator in How I Learned Geography falls in love with the exotic sounding names on the map his father brings home, and he makes a little rhyme out of them. Supply your students with a map or atlas of the area of the world, country, or state you are studying, and ask them to choose their favorite sounding place names from the list. Record these on the board or chart paper. Next,
challenge them to return to the map and find at least two pairs of names that rhyme, as Uri Shulevitz did. Then help them to create a four line place name rhyme in an aa-bb rhyming pattern. [Note: Introduce or revisit the concept of stressed and unstressed syllables that create the rhythm in poetry; revise your poem to ensure that it that scans properly.]

Sailing on the Wings of Imagination

In both How I Learned Geography and When I Wore My Sailor Suit Uri Shulevitz uses imagination as the vehicle of travel. Begin by reading both stories and asking students to discuss what the two books have in common. Once they have discovered that the main character/narrator in each book travels far away in his imagination, one by flying and one by sailing, invite students to answer these three questions:

Where would you like to travel? How would you like to get there (walk, drive, fly, sail, etc.)? What would you see when you got there?

When each student has determined the answers to the three questions, invite them to write about and illustrate their imagined journey using either the listing technique Shulevitz uses in How I Learned Geography or the narrative format he uses in When I Wore My Sailor Suit. [Note: For the youngest students, ask them to draw the pictures and then help them to scribe their text at the bottom of the page.]

Editorial Reviews

“Fascinating.” —The Wall Street Journal

“It is a masterpiece.” —New York Times Book Review

“Shulevitz's simply worded text can be read to preschoolers, but it packs an emotional punch that will resonate with older children and even adults. The watercolor and ink illustrations add further depth as Shulevitz switches from a monochrome palette to a chorus of colors spotlighting how the map stirred his imagination.” —Washington Post Book World

“Caldecott Medal winner Uri Shulevitz's newest picture book, How I Learned Geography, is really a love story for the world. It belongs to the newly popular genre of memoir as picture book. Shulevitz handles his autobiographical material with grace and humor. . . . Shulevitz always puts character at the forefront of his work. The expressions and gestures of his characters are believable, human-scale, and tender, full of dreaming.” —The Boston Globe

“Lyrical watercolors depict . . . the power of imagination.” —The San Francisco Chronicle

“The essence of his tale lies in the power of imagination.” —The Sacramento Bee

“The story and its triumphant afterword demonstrate that Uri masters much more than geography; he realizes the importance of nurturing the soul.” —Starred, Publishers Weekly

“This poignant story can spark discussion about the power of the imagination to provide comfort in times of dire need.” —Starred, School Library Journal

“Whether enjoyed as a reflection of readers' own imaginative travels, or used as a creative entree to classroom geography units, this simple, poignant offering will transport children as surely as the map it celebrates.” —Starred, Booklist

“Signature watercolor illustrations contrast the stark misery of refugee life with the boundless joys of the imagination.” —Kirkus Reviews

“This is a wonderful tale and a timely message of hope.” —Ellen Scott, The Bookworm, Omaha, NE

“A tribute to the power of wide imaginative horizons, this gains impact from its basis in Shulevitz's own experiences, which give it reality beyond mere wishful thinking.” —Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books

“This is a natural pair with Peter Sis's The Wall for its depiction of a gifted young artist finding inspiration and expressing himself despite profoundly daunting circumstances.” —The Horn Book

“This simple, poignant offering will transport children as surely as the map it celebrates.” —Book Links

From the Publisher

Since 1963, Uri Shulevitz has commanded attention. In that year, a refugee in his 20s, he published his first picture book, The Moon in My Room. Forty-five years, a Caldecott Medal, numerous honors and more than 40 titles later, Shulevitz now gives us his first explicitly autobiographical story. It is a masterpiece…What is this book but a sequence of the folk tales Shulevitz has been telling from the beginning? The destruction of family happiness, the reversal of fortune, the foolish bargain, the impossible task: all these classic themes control this story. In framing his own story, replacing autobiographical fact with archetypal forms, Shulevitz keeps the focus on the inner world that he has so consistently illuminated. Once again, he reminds us that folly is not the opposite of wisdom, but so close a relative that the two are often mistaken.
—The New York Times

Elizabeth Devereaux

Shulevitz's simply worded text can be read to preschoolers, but it packs an emotional punch that will resonate with older children and even adults. The watercolor and ink illustrations add further depth as Shulevitz switches from a monochrome palette to a chorus of colors spotlighting how the map stirred his imagination.
—The Washington Post

Karen MacPherson

In a work more personal than Caldecott Medalist Shulevitz (The Fool of the World and the Flying Ship ) has ever before offered, he summons boyhood memories of WWII and shows how he learned to defeat despair. Fleeing Warsaw shortly after the Germans invaded in 1939, the child Uri and his parents eke out a miserable existence in Kazakhstan. One day, Father comes home from the bazaar with a huge map of the world instead of food. Uri, only four or five, is "furious," and as the couple sharing the one-room hut eats that night, the husband noisily chewing a crust "as if it were the most delicious morsel in the world," Uri hides under his blanket to cover his envy and rage. But shortly after his father unrolls the map, the boy is swept away by exotic place-names ("Okazaki Miyazaki Pinsk,/ Pennsylvania Transylvania Minsk!"), picturing them remote from his hunger and suffering. As Uri taps into his artistic imagination and draws maps of his own, Shulevitz's illustrations shed their bleak, neorealist feel, and his beaten-down younger self becomes a Sendakian figure-sturdily compact, balletic, capable of ecstatic, audacious adventures. The story and its triumphant afterword demonstrate that Uri masters much more than geography; he realizes the importance of nurturing the soul. Ages 4-8. (Apr.)

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Publishers Weekly

Gr 2-5- Shulevitz provides a note and early drawings to source this story based on his own childhood experience. A small boy and his parents flee Poland in 1939. They travel to Turkestan (modern-day Kazakhstan) where they live in one room in a house made of "clay, straw, and camel dung" with strangers. When the narrator's father returns from the bazaar with a huge map instead of bread to feed his starving family, his wife and son are furious. But the map turns out to provide food for his spirit as the youngster becomes fascinated by its every detail. Using his imagination, he can transport himself to all of the exotic-sounding places on it without ever leaving the dreary room in which it hangs. The folk-style illustrations, rendered in collage, watercolor, and ink, combined with the brief text, create a perfectly paced story. A page turn to discover where Father is going "one day" brings readers into a Russian bazaar with its crowds of colorful sellers and buyers, the scene closely resembling a drawing the illustrator made at age 10. Scenes framed in white depict the family boxed in by their desperate circumstances, first fleeing their war-torn country with its angry red-black sky, and then cramped in their small room in a distant land. The frames disappear as the boy imagines himself released from his confinement to travel his newly discovered world. This poignant story can spark discussion about the power of the imagination to provide comfort in times of dire need.-Marianne Saccardi, formerly at Norwalk Community College, CT

School Library Journal

A refugee boy learns more than geography from his father in this autobiographical memoir. A small boy and his parents flee war's devastation and travel "far, far east to another country," where summer is hot and winter is cold. Aliens in a bleak land, the boy and his parents sleep on a dirt floor and are very hungry. One day the boy's father comes home from the bazaar with a map instead of bread and the boy is furious. But when the father hangs the map, it covers an entire wall, filling the barren room with color. The boy spends hours studying and drawing the map and making rhymes out of exotic place names. He forgets he has no toys or books. Without leaving the room, he journeys to deserts, beaches, mountains, temples, fruit groves and cities. In the spare text, Shulevitz pays tribute to his father as he recounts his family's flight from Warsaw to Turkestan in 1939. Signature watercolor illustrations contrast the stark misery of refugee life with the boundless joys of the imagination. (author's note) (Picture book. 4-8)

Kirkus Reviews

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