What to Read Next if you love Anne of Green Gables

If your kids are anything like mine, when they find a book they like, their first question is: are there any more of these?  Lucky for Anne fans, there are seven more in the series, but if you finish those and still want more, here are some other books with a similar feel.

Emily of New Moon series by L. M. Montgomery

L. M. Montgomery was a very prolific author, so you might want to check out more of her books. My favorite series after Anne was the Emily of New Moon series. Like Anne, Emily is an orphan and is sent to live with her stern aunt on a farm. Emily is also an imaginative writer who loves words. But despite these similarities, she's quite different from Anne: more rebellious and spunky. These books deal with some darker elements than the Anne books: Emily's father's death, Emily's friend Teddy's abusive mother, so maybe they are better read at an older age. I read them in middle school. There are, sadly, only three books in this series, but Emily is definitely a character worth knowing.

Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm by Kate Douglas Wiggin

This is a classic I missed reading as a child. I picked it up a few years ago to read as an adult and really enjoyed it. There are many similarities with Anne of Green Gables. It was published five years before Anne, so some people speculate that it inspired Anne. Rebecca comes from a large family on a farm. Her mother sends her to stay with her two aunts and the books follow her through her graduation from high school. While Wiggin does not do character development as well as L. M. Montgomery, I do love how Rebecca adapts to her new environment and brings beauty to the world around her.

Understood Betsy by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

A friend of mine recommended this book to me a few years ago. We started reading it out loud on a car trip, and Brent and I liked it so much, we had to stay up and finish reading it even though all the kids had dozed off. Spoiled and overprotected Betsy must leave her home in the city with her aunt and stay with her country cousins in Vermont. While she's there, her cousins help her to learn how to do things for herself, and it transforms her life. Fisher was a big proponent of Montessori education, and this could be seen as a novelization of her educational theories, but since she's also a great writer, the book doesn't get bogged down in it. Of course, I grew up in the country and so that might make me a bit biased in my opinion of the Putney cousins. I think they're awesome.

Betsy-Tacy by Maud Hart Lovelace

Okay, so this list is turning into a catalog of classic books I missed as a child, but would have loved. How did I not hear about Betsy-Tacy? I have no idea, but if your kids love old-fashioned stories of great friends who have various adventures around their neighborhood, these are the books for you. The books follow the lives of best friends Betsy and Tacy (and later Tib) all the way through high school and beyond. We read these aloud and the girls loved the first four books. They lost interest a bit when they entered high school, but I'm sure they will pick them up again when they are older and enjoy the whole series.

Is there a children's book you or your child has loved, and you would like to know what to read next? I hope to do more book lists like these, so leave a comment, and I will do my best to help you out!

Anne of Green Gables Tea Party

The girls were extremely excited to throw an old-fashioned Anne of Green Gables tea party for their friends. We decorated with every embroidered doily we could find. The day before, we spent a few hours with the Anne of Green Gables cookbook, and whipped up some Ruby Tea Biscuits. We even made our own Raspberry cordial, which was amazingly delicious, and did not intoxicate anyone.

 

We made a cake and remembered to use vanilla, stead of liniment.

 

 But in true Anne-ish style, our tea party did not go off perfectly. For example I may have accidentally turned on the wrong burner when I went to heat the tea. I may have left the baking sheets on top of this burner, and the parchment paper lining the sheets may have briefly caught fire. But it was extinguished quickly with no one the wiser, I think.

Then there was the matter of the hats. We decided to make some fancy hats for the party. I used a paper plate for the bottom, and a paper bowl for the top. I glued them all together the night before and then let the kids decorate them with lace, ribbon, and silk flowers. The boys used old pieces of silk ties for their hat-bands. We stapled a piece of elastic beading string around the chin to keep them on. This is the point where I permanently lost one of my children to a full-blown tantrum because the elastic was either too tight or too loose or too something. She stayed in our pantry for the rest of the party. 

 

But, all of the other children at the party were all decked out in style. Some of them may have worn these hats for days, even to places one might not normally wear a paper plate hat, like Costco. And just as our guests were leaving, my wayward child did reappear to eat some cake and joyfully wear her hat for the rest of the day. It just wouldn't be an Anne tea party, without drama, right?

The Perils of Reading Anne of Green Gables

While I've been extolling the virtues of reading L. M. Montgomery books, I thought that I should warn you that your children may exhibit certain strange behaviors after being exposed to these books. Proceed with caution.

• There is a distinct possibility that when you try to sweep the floor in your home, you will be referred to as "the hired woman who works for my auntie."
• Your three-year-old who has always been obsessed with pulling your hair will still pull your hair, but will now say "Carrots!" when she does it.
• Your children may begin to think that "orphanage runner" is a job category to which they should aspire, and you may even overhear them saying disturbing things like, "We're playing we're in an orphanage and Daddy is dead and you run the orphanage."
• They may begin to insist on only wearing floor-length skirts and beg to grow their hair out and wear it in braids. You will then have to deal with your own issues that your children have begun to look like "homeschoolers."
• Your children may become strangely obsessed with Mrs. Rachel Lynde, and run around the house, pretending to be Marilla and Rachel, leaping over "cow pens" and yelling, "I feel like a young child again!" Not even I can explain that one.

Anne School: Anne of Green Gables for K-2

What do you do when the kids beg you to learn about Anne of Green Gables, but it's not on your curriculum? In fact, it's not really on any First Grade curricula. Well, you make it up as you go along.

The best resource I found for this age group was a blog called One Room Schoolhouse. She had put together a K-2 unit for her grandchildren based on Anne of Green Gables. She has links to videos and other resources, which inspired several of our lessons on making friends, fashion through history, geography, and baking a cake.

I also put together a fun handwriting lesson. I printed out some images from Sullivan Entertainment and wrote out handwriting cards to go with them. I posted them around the house and we did a "Write Around the Room" using our slates to copy the words down. For my preschooler, I gave her another copy of the picture and she ran around trying to match them up. Then we played Memory with all the cards  when we were done. In fact, we've played Memory with the Anne cards nearly every day since then.

We listened to the audiobooks of the original books as we were going along, but we also used this picture book adaptation by M.C. Hellendorfer.

I would never suggest skipping the real book for a picture book, but  the picture book worked well as our normal Five in a Row book. We read the picture book almost every day and enjoyed the beautiful illustrations by Ellen Beier. We learned about Prince Edward Island and Canada for Social Studies. We acted out our favorite scenes from the book and tried to guess.We drew our dream dresses with or without puffed sleeves.

We also read several chapters from the Anne of Green Gables Treasury. This book is chock-full of information from Anne's family tree to a floor-plan of Green Gables and a timeline of her life. It has interesting chapters on fashion and schooling at the time, and recipes and crafts.

 

The girls really enjoyed making Victorian scrapbooks. Ella titled hers "Ella's Scrapbook and Buk of Olfashun stuf." I made a simple stapled book and we printed out images from The Graphics Fairy. This website has a huge amount of copyright-free vintage images organized by category. We also looked through magazines for other old-fashioned items. I also ordered the girls Anne of Green Gables coloring books from Dover publications. I didn't realize that these also included an abridged version of the book along with the coloring pages.The kids enjoyed them, but were quick to point out that it was not the real book.

For science and math, we made "Ruby tea biscuits" and "Anne's Liniment cake" from the Anne of Green Gables cookbook, (without the liniment, of course). These were all for our Anne of Green Gables tea party, but I will save that for another post.

When Books are Kindred Spirits

Photos copyright Sullivan Entertainment Social Download Pack

Anne of Green Gables was one of my favorite books as a child. I read the whole series when I was in sixth grade and all eight books took up a position of honor in the little bookshelf that was built into the head of my bed, where they would be available to me at a moment's notice for re-reading.

After a failed attempt at reading it aloud to our oldest daughter a few years ago, I was convinced that it would, sadly, be a long-time until I could share it with my daughters. Then in January, I thought we might watch part of the Anne of Green Gables mini-series for our family movie night. Our girls had been loving the old episodes of Little House on the Prairie television show and my friends' tween daughter had assured me that "they grew up on the movies." So I thought we could give it a try.  The girls were immediately hooked. I had intended to just watch the younger years, but they demanded the sequel too. As I love the original miniseries almost as much as the books, I was happy to comply.

That soon led to the listening to the first three audiobooks and Rainbow Valley, and the girls begging to do a unit on Anne for school. Then they found out that their best friends had also just watched the movie and were equally obsessed. Now whenever they are together they act out full scenes from the movie - in costume.

In a misguided attempt to add some calm and soothing music to our day, I checked out the soundtrack to the movie from the library. It only took the girls a few tracks to discover that track three was the scene where Anne and Diana chase the cow out of the field.

Photo copyright Sullivan Entertainment Creative Commons

This meant that every time that track came on they had to dash in a big loop around our house mooing and yelling "Anne, mind your dress!" Then they had to put the track on repeat so they could chase the cow some more. When they introduced their friends to this game, it became so popular that they began to request that we bring the music with us to their house so that all nine of them could chase the cow. Now when the music starts to play, even my 21-month-old son comes running, yelling, "Anne! Anne!"

One day, in the thick of this Anne-mania,  I was talking with my husband about how formative these books were for me as a child. I remember riding my bike up the dirt road behind our house and naming my favorite spots on our property. There was one particular bank where the trees had been cleared. I named this place Teaberry Gardens because of the tiny, red teaberries you could find growing on the ground. The berries were not sweet, but had the sharp bite of wintergreen. While Anne had her red, dirt roads and the wind off the sea, I had a ring of mountains on every side, which I used to imagine looked like the graves of giants. She had brooks and  Idlewild and I had creeks that were so cold they turned your ankles red and my little hidden spot in the woods I named Terabithia (after another of my favorite books). Anne taught me that you could love a place deeply, even if that place was out-of-the-way and a bit old-fashioned. She taught me that I could love my home-place in West Virginia as much as she loved Prince Edward Island.

"But wait," my husband asked me. "Didn't you read the books after all of that?" After a stunned silence, I said, "You're right. I didn't read them until I was in sixth grade. Maybe they weren't formative after all, maybe they just made my life make sense."

Some books are good stories, but other books are kindred spirits. They take hold of you and draw you in. You look out at the world and see a lake of shining waters where there had only been a pond. In its reflection, you find you a whole new way of seeing yourself, and suddenly you find that you make sense, that perhaps you are a kindred spirit after all.