Along The Underground

Henry’s Freedom Box

Written by: Ellen Levine

Illustrated by: Kadir Nelson

Published by Scholastic 2007

40 Pages

Historical Fiction

Henry’s Freedom Box was read to me by one of my professors in class one day. I really enjoyed the story and loved how the illustrations showed so much depth. Henry was born into slavery. The master his family worked for became ill and Henry thought he might free them. Instead he gave Henry to his son and he was separated from the rest of his family. Henry was a hard worker and did everything his master told him to do. He met a girl one day and fell in love. They were soon married and had a family. Then one day his worst fear happened, his family was sold. Now all Henry could think about was being a free man with hopes of one day seeing his family again. Does Henry ever become free? Make sure to grab a copy of Henry’s Freedom Box to see if Henry became a free man.

The illustrations in Henry’s Freedom Box were created with pencil, watercolors, and oils. Nelson added so much texture to each page in the story you can almost imagine how things felt. The illustrator did an amazing job on the facial expressions on the characters. You can see the desperation and fear in their eyes. If you were to flip through this book without reading the words you could use the illustrations to figure out what might be happening and how the characters are feeling.

This book is appropriate for ages 4-8. The grade level this book is suited for is preschool to third grade. I believe that it could also be used till about fourth grade. After reading henry’s Freedom Box you could talk about character traits have the students write down all of the characters traits of Henry. The students could also try to build a replica of the box Henry was in using cardstock paper. A great vocabulary activity for the students to learn important words from the text would be a Bingo came. The Bingo board has vocabulary words on them and the teacher calls out the definition for the students to mark the correct word.