This book might be historical fiction! With the Amish lifestyle there is no way to know. The illustrations of this book are really beautiful and sophisticated. I was actually surprised to see that Fuchs does children's books frequently because his style is to mature, definitely not intentionally catered for children. I like that the narrator within this book gives several depictions of Amish values such as their farming techniques and foods such as apple butter and we are brought through traditional Amish barn raising but I wish there was more concrete information about the general lifestyle. I do not feel like a book should need a lesson before or after on the community that it is depicting and I cannot see any other way of reading this book. ( )

Raising Yoder's Barn is about an Amish family that loses their barn on a July night after being stuck by lightning during a thunderstorm. After the family realizes that their barn is no longer reliable they are told by Samuel Stulzfoot to tear it down and a new barn will be built. The next day, the entire Amish community helped to rebuild that family's barn. Personally I felt a connection with the whole Amish family because if something were to happen in my family we would all try our best to help each other out. This book can teach children about community and how to be supportive of others. ( )

Summary
This book is about a hard working Amish family who in one night loses everything when light strikes their barn and burns it to the ground. Their Amish neighbors come together to help them and together they work and rebuilt their livelihood.
Personal Reaction
I liked this book I thought some of the phrases sounded poetic. It was a great book to show hard work and how good it is to help one another also shed some light on the Amish culture.
Extension ideas
This book is a great way to show children how the Amish live and what it would be like to live so old fashion without the things we have today.
Many activities could be done like having the kids pretend to work and cook like Amish do.

ESL classroom use: proper nouns, sentence structure, adjectives. ( )

This book is about an Amish family whose barn gets struck by lightning and catches fire. It is a story about how the Amish community helps out and raises the barn in just one day.

This book was kind of boring, but the art work was nice and it had a lot of visual words in it such as the boy getting pearly blisters that reminded him of the barley in his mother's soup.

In my opinion this book isn't really that good for small children. The only extension I could think of is to add a barn and animals to the block area or have children build a barn out of blocks.