Jeremiah learns to read

✍ Scribed by Jo Ellen Bogart, Illustrated short stories

• Book ID: 111675784
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 493 KB
• Series: Illustrated short stories
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Jeremiah does not fit the down-and-out image of an illiterate old man. He’s led a particularly successful life on the farm, where he builds split-rail fences, cooks buttermilk pancakes, and grows delicious vegetables. Although he can read the signs of the seasons and the code of the natural landscape, letters and words have somehow never been accessible to him. Supported by his family in his desire to learn to “be even better,” Jeremiah heads off to the rural schoolhouse. As he learns the alphabet and phonics with the help of the children who are his classmates, Jeremiah also teaches the curriculum he has already mastered so well – bird sounds, applesauce making, and the whittling of wood. One day he takes a book of poetry home from school. That night his wife is so moved by his readings on nature that she, too, decides to learn to read, and he offers to be her teacher.