The Birchbark House

Erdrich, L. (1999). The Birchbark House. New York, NY: Hyperion Books.

Brief Annotation: In the 1840’s on an island in Lake Superior, young Omakayas lives with the Ojibwa family who adopted her as a baby. The novel explores the colorful details of one full year of her life and culture when she is 7 years old. Life changes for the Ojibwa family each season, starting with the spring when the family builds a new birchbark house by the lake. During the summer, Omakayas is able to spend time with her baby brother who she adores, her annoying young brother, and the older sister that she looks up to. She also makes some new friends and learns about a valuable gift that she has. In the fall, her family moves to a log cabin to prepare for the harsh winter. During the winter, her family is struck with the smallpox virus, and suffers some heart-wrenching losses. When spring arrives again, the family makes another birchbark house, and Omakayas learns about her past.

Genre: Historical Fiction

Grade Level: 4-7

Readers who will like this: Readers who love animals and nature, family, history, Native American cultures, and stories about survival and perseverance.

Response/Rating (1-4): 4. This story has many wonderful, vivid details that bring to life the characters, the setting and the culture of the Ojibwe people.

One question you would ask before a read aloud: Do you know anything about the Ojibwa culture of Native Americans?

Reading Strategies Connection: A learning strategy that would be great to use with this text is the Clusters activity (Tomkins, 2009). In this learning strategy, students or the teacher, would pick a topic from the story and students would write this topic within a circle in the center of a piece of paper or the chalkboard. Then the students would make a spider web diagram with words and phrases about that topic to display knowledge that they have gained about this topic by reading this text. The topics could be broad subjects, such as “the Ojibwa culture”, or more narrow, such as “foods eaten by the historical Ojibwa culture”. The traits of individual characters, and abstract concepts modeled in the text, like bravery or respect, can also be represented in a Cluster diagram.
This reading strategy would compliment The Birchbark House because the text offers such a wealth of detailed information to draw from about the Ojibwa culture and the individual characters.