In Farmer's Market: Families Working Together two families the Thao, a Hmong family, and the Kornder family, a German family, both contribute to the local farmer’s market. The book describes the farming process from planting to harvesting and the specifics behind making a particular crop grow. The story stresses the coming together of cultures at the farmer's market and how food is a great unifier and educator to cultures.
Looking at the readability lexiles, the language is rooted in the middle elementary level because of longer sentences and process-based plot showing how food is grown and harvested. There are also some unique low-frequency words like “topsoil”, “corms” and “nutrients”. Cognitively, I would place it at an upper elementary level. Students must keep track of two families and the process from planting to selling. In addition to this, concepts such as seasons and the actions that are tied to them are stressed as being extremely important. Socially, I would place the story in the middle elementary level because students have to understand the Thao and Kornder families are working together to achieve a goal. Through their teamwork as families and in a larger sense at the farmer’s market, their hard work is rewarded with a strong social relationship between grower and buyer.
While analyzing the characteristics of high quality learning, I found the characters in the book faced large scale issues that were interesting to readers, such as: teamwork, creating something and working hard to achieve a goal. On a smaller scale, I felt the families didn’t face problems relating to younger students. Many of their small-scale problems were related to farming.
The setting is modern, but each family's ancestry is discussed and how farming has changed from previous generations.
After analyzing the text, I found no explicit higher thought processes employed. Everything is explained, presented in pictures and told in a straightforward manner. I believe the text motivates and inspires students by showing them the process of growing food. Because we all eat, food is something everyone is involved in at some level (usually not growing it, but buying and eating it). In the book we see the actual fields where your food may come from which is a journey few people experience.
The literary elements I found in the text were setting as a mood, accessibility and characterization. In ‘setting as a mood’ the noises, smells and visuals of the farmer's market are all aptly described.
The book’s accessibility allows the author to tell the story in relatively simple terms (although there are some long sentences and advanced words used) explaining what happens at each step in the process of farming with each family. This could be overwhelming to young readers, especially with a possible culture disconnect with each respective family, depending on the child who is reading the book. However, the pictures and captions support the text by reinforcing what is being described. Also, there is a list of definitions listed in the back of the book that explains some possibly new or confusing words.
When I say the characterization is used well, I am referring to the families. Each family has an identity, a method to their farming, different roles within the family and different crops. However, despite these differences that are laid out and explained, there are similarities, like the friends they know at the farmer's market and feeling of community.
There are no illustrations in the text but there are real life pictures that show the evolutionary process from planting to harvesting the food. They also show pictures of each family's ancestors and how growing crops is a part of their history.
An idea for a mini lesson is to have the class investigate the path most produce takes to reach our shelves and compare it to that of a farmer's market. Why is food grown so far away? Having the class grow some of their own food with seeds, create a classroom farmers market and share a meal together at a later date would allow them to be involved in the text.
Looking at the target audience, I would say middle elementary students would enjoy the book the most. It shows how food comes from the earth to our homes and others a multicultural approach that many students may find interesting as they are still learning about the world and having exposure to different races and cultures.
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