Laura E. Williams, illustrated by Craig Orback,
The Can Man
Lee and Low Books, 2010.
Ages 5-10
In Laura E. Williams’ The Can Man, a young boy awakens to compassion. Tim’s bi-racial family remembers when Mr. Peters lived in their building, so they don’t respond to him as the homeless can collector he’s become since he lost his job. Plot tension develops quickly: Tim wants a skateboard for his birthday; his family, not well off themselves, can’t afford it, and Tim’s solution is morally dubious.
Craig Orback’s respectful, sensitive oil paintings depict life in a tree-lined neighborhood of neat three-story apartment buildings. One day Tim gets an idea, and while young readers will identify with his excitement as he begins to collect cans himself to earn money, they’ll also experience an unsettling prick of conscience, for Tim hasn’t realized, as they will have, that he’s taking the cans Mr. Peters relies on for income.
The neighborhood grocer and Tim’s mom both mention that Mr. Peters usually collects those cans, but Tim’s fixation on the skateboard has deafened his conscience. It’s only when he runs into Mr. Peters himself, clutching at his tattered coat on a winter Saturday, his shopping cart nearly empty, that Tim begins to consider the consequences of his greed.
Orback and Williams, who have each won numerous awards for their respective projects, make a fine team for The Can Man. Both Mr. Peters and Tim get what they need by the end of the story. Between the lines and through the images, an unspoken message is that young people develop moral sensitivity through the example of their elders. Tim has wise role models in his mother and the grocer as well as in Mr. Peters, whose humanity shines through despite potentially embittering circumstances. Tim is a fortunate boy, and young readers will likely take in many levels of meaning from this subtle, powerful story.
Charlotte Richardson
March 2011
Many of our books, including this season’s The Can Man
deal with economic concepts. We asked Yana V. Rodgers, a professor at Rutgers and head of the
Rutgers University Project on Economics and Children, to talk about why and how to teach economics in today’s busy classrooms.
Building Blocks for the Future
Decades of research in economics, education, and early-childhood development have shown that young children enter the primary grades with an experience-based knowledge of economics and that they are quite capable of learning basic economics during the primary grades. The economic lessons that young students learn in their early education form the building blocks toward achieving a solid understanding of economics at higher levels of educational attainment. Students in the primary grades are already gaining a rich exposure to a wide variety of ideas in economics, and they are gaining the skills to apply this new knowledge. The principles taught at a level appropriate for primary-grade students are crucial for a basic understanding of the economic world around them.
Educational reforms since the 1960s have led to the development of formal content standards in economics and the infusion of economics as a central component of social studies curricula in every grade level. Because of the standards movement, even elementary school teachers face considerable pressure to teach economic content that is based on state requirements and is often linked to school accreditation and funding. Increasingly crowded curricula are a common issue, and many teachers feel they are too busy to teach economics. As almost all states have added economics to their state-mandated curricula in the primary grades, teaching strategies have needed to change.
Primary-grade students can gain exposure to a wide range of the economic concepts contained in state standards if teachers use reading strategies that embrace children’s literature—both fiction and nonfiction—with economic content. In the face of crowded curricula, this approach allows teachers to simultaneously teach reading strategies and empower their students to understand economics.
Teaching Strategies
Using children’s literature to teach economics is gaining in popularity. A common approach is for teachers to integrate literature with economic content into classroom time devoted primarily to reading aloud to children or to reading instruction, with a relatively short discussion of the main economic ideas. Primary-grade teachers already read aloud to their students daily, and teachers know they can use high-quality literature for a variety of purposes. Such purposes include demonstrating story structure, teaching author’s craft, building vocabulary, and teaching content areas. Because more requirements are added to the elementary school curricula each year, teachers are looking for ways to achieve more than one objective in the same lesson. Furthermore, because most children enjoy stories, teaching economics within a literature framework can add to student motivation. The visual images and text work together to help students conceptualize how economics operates in the world around them.
While teaching economics through literature may have its intuitive appeal, there are drawbacks. In particular, because the genre is children’s literature and not textbooks, economic vocabulary and concepts are not systematically presented across books or even within books. Closely related, the teaching strategy requires that teachers highlight functional lessons for economic topics that may not be readily apparent in the story. Children’s books about topics such as savings and jobs have obvious economic lessons that are difficult to miss because they relate so easily to children’s everyday
