This book is a heart wrenching story from the start! It is a photographic essay of the lives of children growing up in poverty during The Great Depression. This book really puts The Great Depression into perspective and humanizes the history of this time period with poignant efficiency. There are detailed charts, including a shopping list from The Great Depression compared to annual salaries from the time period. The photos really bring the horror into focus. From the "Hooverville shanties to the stories of children forced to migrate from camp to camp just to get a meal the reader is slowly educated about the painful existence of these youth of The Great Depression.
Freedman, who was a journalist for the Associated Press during the 1950's has written at least 25 books and I have little doubt as to the accuracy of the accounts he has placed in this book.
The book is accessible in that the Index passed with 4/4 of all items I wished to look up being there. The bibliography is sparse only because, surprisingly, there has been little scholarly research and writing on the subject of The Great Depression with regard to its effects on the lives of children. There are effective notes on each chapter which in the absence of a glossary is a welcome addition. The photos are as relevant and timely as they are well placed with respect to the narrative.
Teachers: This will make an excellent source book and companion to any study of people (children in particular) who lived during The Great Depression. Its outline and notes will make it very useful for your students to use
Students: As mentioned above, you will find this book very accessible as well as useful in any report or research paper about The Great Depression. It is also an easy, fast flowing read. However, be ready to feel heartbroken for these children. ( )

Freedman uses the photographs of the Farm Security Administration, which were snapped by renowned photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Walker Evens, and Arthur Rothstein (among others), to show twenty-first century children what it looked like to be young and dirt poor during the Great Depression. It is one thing to teach children in social studies that millions of Americans struggled through grinding privation, but Freedman shows them and supports the photographs with an informative and beautifully written narrative.

The black and white photographs capture both the quiet desperation and the unrelenting hope of this era. An excellent resource for teaching nonfiction reading or for gathering information in Social studies.

I would use this in a fifth grade classroom as an interactive read aloud to teach the students about the Great Depression. This way they can ask questions and i can lead them further in instruction.

You could use this book as a 4th grade read aloud. You could extend the book into a lesson on predictions and inferring. Before beginning the book, you could show the children pictures from The Great Depression and they could make predictions about what the pictures meant. You could also use this in a 5th grade classroom as a read aloud. You could extend this into a math lesson. Students will be given the prices of items during The Great Depression such as milk, bread, shoes, etc and they will be given the prices of those items in today's time. They will then turn these into fractions to see how much of a difference there is in the prices.