Seedfolks

Pleasantly surprised by this novella. Little girl in a poverty stricken Cleveland neighborhood decides to plant Lima beans in a neglected, trash filled lot. Others folks from the neighborhood from different backgrounds and religions become a new sort of family. Cute and uplifting.

A nice, quick read about the meshing of various cultures & personalities in a seemingly divided Cleveland neighborhood. I wasn't blown away, but it was a feel-good book.

Great for teaching diversity and multiculturalism. Each person in the book has their own background and story and they all come together for one purpose. The garden brings everyone together as a community.

This is a series of quick vignettes, all surrounding the creation of a community garden in a run down neighbourhood. Each new character encounters the garden in a different way, and for a few pages, we see a glimpse into their life.

The stories were all familiar stories, of people dislocated from

Show More

from the bodies around them, by age, language, or culture. The garden, while it brings people together, does not cure any of the problems that divided people. The garden ends up with plots in cliques, people being nasty to fellow gardeners, and a few fences.

As a killer of plants, I had to stomp on my resentment that once again the idyllic pastoral dream, one I cannot participate in, is seen as the solution to the city's ills. The cliché that reconnecting with dirt reconnects us with our common humanity.

Show Less

This book is so short, but packs a powerful punch. Each brief chapter tells the story of one of the people who becomes involved in a community garden in inner-city Cleveland. The book shows the power of community and the connections people can make when they step outside of their usual boundaries.

This short story provides monologues from 13 different people and their perspective on a local garden. One girl decides to honor her father on the anniversary of his death by planting lima bean seeds in a small plot of land covered in garbage. That one action has a domino effect on the community

Show More

and eventually people from all over this diverse part of Cleveland to grow vegetables and flowers. Each community member faces different hardships but this garden acts as an agent to bring people together.
The dialect of each person is so beautifully portrayed that it feels like you are having a conversation with him/her. I also appreciate that the story identified people in the community that did not participate in the garden and in fact, threw trash in it or stole from it, because it made the story more believable. There are also small head shots at the beginning of every chapter which serve as a nice tool to picture the person telling you his/her story. This would be a great book to introduce the topic of diversity or changing the world one small step at a time.

Show Less

This is one of my favorites from grade school, but it transfers to adults also. It shows how little acts of caring and kindness by a few people can transform a neighborhood, and that you don't have to be the stereotypical "White Knight" to save your city.. Obviously, since the heroine is only about

Show More

8 years old. And it's about gardens and fresh food, which i love and is totally AWESOME!. The Broken Window Theory running backwards i guess you could say...

Show Less

Seedfolks touched my heart. I loved the various stories from the various point of views and how a garden affected those people. I loved the multicultural community building theme of the book. It demonstrates racial tolerance and the beauty of nature's effects. The only problem I had with this book

Show More

is that it kept me wanting to know more! I wanted to hear how the various characters stories progressed. I would love to have students write their own endings to an individuals stories. This is a great way to model point of views and to teach students how to write from different perspectives on a singular issue.

Show Less

This was an interesting little read and predictable for an adult. For a young reader it would be eye opening. I enjoyed how the book started with person A adn the next thing you know A is intertwined accidentally with person B, C, D, etc.... This book was a journey through the neighborhood's people

Show More

and cultures and problems but tied them together with a common string. I liked that the chapters were short, the book moved quickly, and identified people in specific and varied ways. I would use this book to teach or discuss community, friendship, teamwork, real life issues like loneliness, aging, teen pregnancy, heritage, elders, etc.... for upper grades. In an SDA situation 7-10 grades for public 5th-10th grades due to the teen pregnancy, marijuana, and violent robbery mentioned in the book. It was good though.

Show Less

Each chapter tell part of a story about people in an inner city neighborhood. It begins with the simple action of a young girl and how this act changes a community and the individuals in it. In this case, a young girl missing her father plants some beans in his honor. This sparks those in the

Show More

neighborhood to join in. They create a community garden plot and in the process grow their own relationships and add value to their home lives. It is heartwarming and inspirational.

Show Less

I like the multiple points of view Paul uses to tell this story

A garden becomes the melting pot for many different cultures that come together for one goal-improve the downtown of Cleveland. They are all interconnected and the walls of racism are broken down.

MS Realism
Fleischman, P. (1997). Seedfolks. New York: Joanna Cotler Books.

Cleveland is a big city, and not much on Gibb street is very nice. Buildings are falling down or abandoned and violence is a regular occurrence on the street. And one vacant lot is the neighborhood’s local dump, until one

Show More

day, when a young Vietnamese girl decides to plant some lima beans. People begin to realize that the stinky lot is transforming into a neighborhood garden.
Fleischman brilliantly brings together a community of people who once believed they had nothing in common. The story is told through the eyes of thirteen different characters. Each story builds the unity of the neighbors as the garden continues to grow. Seedfolks is a powerful example of people from different cultures coming together and uniting as one community.

Show Less

This novel was an excellent read for me. I liked the fact that something as small as a garden can bring a huge diverse group of people together. The garden was its own community, and that is what gave others an excuse to talk to people different than they. This book tells its readers that everyone

Show More

needs to put the stereotypes aside because then you will feel more comfortable with talking to others. This story also touched upon, once someone actually gets to know someone different than him or her, the obvious differences are no longer noticed. When people know each other, they look at one another like "people" and not color or gender for example. This is a great book to help children understand that, yes, everyone is different, we come from different places and have many different experiences, but most of us all want some of the same things, acceptance and friends.

Show Less

teaching- great for teaching perspectives,teaching too

I really enjoyed this book. It's another one that adults might be better equipped to appreciate than younger readers. It's a celebration of community and the efforts that one person can make that start a life of their own.

This could be used for a study of multiculturalism, ethnicity, neighborhood

Show More

revitalization, immigration...It's a feel good story.

Show Less

An old man seeking renewal, a young girl connecting to a father she never knew, a pregnant teenager dreading motherhood, are just a few of the 13 voices that tell one story of the flowering of a vacant city lot into a neighborhood garden. Old, young, Haitian, Korean, Hispanic, tough, haunted, and

Show More

hopeful.
Newbery Medal winner Paul Fleischman weaves characters as diverse as the plants they grow into a multi-layered exploration of how a community is born and nurtured in an urban environment. Illustrations.

Show Less

This is a collection of 13 different takes on a community garden in Cleveland. The neighborhood is rough, and there are a lot of people from different backgrounds. The community garden is started by an Asian girl, who strives to be like her father. Soon, the whole area catches the gardening bug.

Show More

They all join together and turn the community into a positive environment. Fleischman did a wonderful in capturing this story from different points of views. It made it special seeing how many lives it touched. I would use this book to show my students how a town can come together to create something positive. Community gardens are great, and it brings all different types of people together. It would be nice to start a garden in the school, and grow organic produce.

Show Less

13 different people of different race explain their outtake on the community garden in Cleveland started by an Asian girl wanting to be like her father. She plants Lima beans in a vacant, littered lot on Gibbs street.The garden transformed the neighborhood because it was once a neighborhood where

Show More

no one spoke to one another, but the crops gave the neighbors a reason to talk to each other, knowing that even though they were different, they were still the same and shared common interests. This book is full of inspiration and hope and great for children in grades 4-6. This book can be used as a guide for multiple lessons; such as multiculturalism, love vs hate, having hope when things don't look so great, and many other topics too! I LOVED this and was completely tuned in form the first page, I wanted to keep reading and reading and reading- but it came to unfortunately had to come to an end!

Show Less

Paul Fleischman represents in this book including different people, ages, and groups. They came from variety of countries. But they all involved in an apartment of community garden in Cleveland. Thirteen people plant and interested in planting different things in the community garden such as, a

Show More

girl with lima beans, Gonzalo with sweet pepper, Leona with goldenrod, Sam with pumpkin, Amir with eggplants, and so on. This book also is a mention to one girl was pregnant when she was young age, sixteen years old. It’s to guide how she could take of herself. They guided other people plant beautiful garden. This book teaches children to know about a garden with different types of people come along together.

Show Less

One girl unintentionally sparks the development of a dumping area in Cleveland. A community of gardeners with no previous relations comes to life. The community has members ranging in culture and in age.

The book would be a great way to open a discussion about community and diversity.

Seedfolks is a story about a garden that brings an entire neighborhood together. It all starts when one little girl, Kim, decides to plan some beans to show her father who passed away before she was born that she was just like him and could grow things. The thing is she plants them in the middle of

Show More

a field filled with junk. Once someone sees the little girl planting things others decide to join her. Eventually someone gets the government to clean the field so that more people could plant. Everyone came to the garden for different reasons but in the end they all stay there for the same reason, they feel accepted into a "family. Great book to use to show children that there is always common ground between people.

Show Less

A story about a community coming together to find a common goal. Told though the voices of 13 very different people with different reasons for wanting growth.

While reading this book I was not as intrigued, actually I was somewhat disappointed at times. What happened with Lateesha and her tomatoes? During class, we had discussions about things that interested us about the text and this is when I began to enjoy the book. The discussions that arose were

Show More

those that held meaning to each student. We had connected with the text and the characters within and through our discussions about the characters we talked about social issues. This book would be a great book to get students to think about aspects of different cultures and social economic statuses. I would use the same method we used in class; as students read they make notes of aspects in the book that are 'worth mentioning' and those that are 'worth discussing'. When students come together to share their ideas, they did further into the text as they discuss the notes they brought and discuss reasons for putting different aspects into each of the two columns.

Show Less