One Green Apple

Title: One Green Apple.

Author: Eve Bunting

Illustrator: Ted Lewin

Genre: realistic fiction

Can you imagine yourself as an immigrant in a new country that you don’t speak the language of? You hear unknown language, see strange people, and get involved in a foreign culture and a completely new and unknown world. How do you feel? You must probably feel scared, insecure and lonely. You are not understood and don’t have any friends.  Farah, the main character of Eve Bunting’s book One Green Apple, has just started a new school in a new country. How does she feel? What does she think and say? If you want to learn about her read this fabulous story of Farah.

Farah is an immigrant girl, who has recently moved to the United States. The author does not provide much information about Farah and her country. Readers can only guess that Farah might be from a Muslim country since she wears a dupatta, a headscarf.  She doesn’t have any friends yet, but it is seen that she is willing to make new friends.  In the story Farah describes her second day of being in American school. Farah feels alone, even when surrounded by her classmates. The girl does not speak English and wears the dupatta (while no one else does), and so feels that she does not belong to the group. The girl has just started learning English and is not involved in a dialog as much. She listens and nods but doesn’t speak. She only says one “outside-myself word” that is new to her, and her classmates’ names when she meets them, trying to learn and memorize them. The reader can see only girl’s thoughts, impressions and understandings.  She finds it so hard not being able to understand what people are saying and what they are expecting from her. We only can read what she wanted to say, but she never says it, because she doesn’t know how to tell it. “I understand,” she wants to say, “It’s not that I am stupid. It’s just that I am lost in this new place.” On a field trip to an apple orchard, Farah discovers there are lots of things that sound the same as they did at home, from dogs crunching their food to the ripple of friendly laughter. As she helps the class make apple cider, Farah connects with the other students and begins to feel that she belongs. She also senses that, like her green apple, she will blend with other children in her new country.

Throughout the story Farah experiences tension between herself and her classmates and her new country. She also tries to adapt herself in this new world and learn it manners and language, and find similarities with her former country. Farah overcomes both of these tensions by blending her apple with everyone’s apple in the apple cider which tells that she is ready to go through journey of change and acceptance.

One Green Apple falls into contemporary realistic fiction genre. It may assist children in putting themselves in immigrant children’s shoes and discussing how they feel and think about those children. Being from a different country, having different religion or just being different from majority doesn’t give others the right to think they are better or to not respect you. The book can be connected to students’ life and fill their inside pain and insecurities, if they fill uncomfortable being different and having different culture and origins.

The vivid and bright, almost three-dimensional illustrations of the book make the story realistic and grab the readers’ attention to get to choose the book for reading. They bring a lot to the meaning of the story. Farah’s facial emotions in the pictures in every line show her inside feelings and thoughts. The green, unripe apple that “fits just right in her hands” look like its golden and she holds it as it is precious. There are not many words and sentences written on a page that makes it easier for decoding words and comprehension due to the big number of pictures. 

One Green Apple can be used to teach variety of English Language Arts standards. The lesson can used to teach plot structure, character description, theme identification and discussion, vocabulary words, punctuation, word decoding, literature elements, and points of view.

The book can be used different grade level from 1 to 5, depending on the purpose. It can fit the third grade standards.

RL.3.2. Recount stories, including fables, folktales, and myths from diverse cultures; determine the central message, lesson, or moral and explain how it is conveyed through key details in the text.

RL.3.3. Describe characters in a story (e.g., their traits, motivations, or feelings) and explain how their actions contribute to the sequence of events.

RL.3.4. Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, distinguishing literal from nonliteral language.

RL.3.6. Distinguish their own point of view from that of the narrator or those of the characters

RL.3.7. Explain how specific aspects of a text’s illustrations contribute to what is conveyed by the words in a story (e.g., create mood, emphasize aspects of a character or setting).

RL.3.MA.8.A. Identify elements of fiction (e.g., characters, setting, plot, problem, solution) and elements of poetry (e.g., rhyme, rhythm, figurative language, alliteration, onomatopoeia).

RI.3.1. Ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of a text, referring explicitly to the text as the basis for the answers.