Jackie Robinson Hometown Hero

Jackie Robinson: Hometown Hero for Grade 2 provides teachers with an informational text focused on Georgia state studies. It is appropriately leveled for different types of reading levels and features primary source materials. This nonfiction reader is aligned to Georgia's Standards of Excellence.

Jackie Robinson: Hometown Hero for Grade 2 provides teachers with an informational text focused on Georgia state studies. It is appropriately leveled for different types of reading levels and features primary source materials. This nonfiction reader is aligned to Georgia's Standards of Excellence.

Jackie Robinson: Hometown Hero for Grade 2 provides teachers with an informational text focused on Georgia state studies. It is appropriately leveled for different types of reading levels and features primary source materials. This nonfiction reader is aligned to Georgia's Standards of Excellence.

Discover the legacy of Jackie Robinson, the first African-American baseball player to play in the major leagues. Through informational text and primary sources, students will learn about Jackie Robinson’s life, from childhood to adulthood, and how he became one of the most famous athletes of all time. This appropriately leveled text promotes social studies content literacy and connects to Georgia Standards of Excellence, WIDA, and the NCSS/C3 framework. This high-interest book includes: Primary source documents and colorful images; Text features such as a glossary, table of contents, and index; Read and response questions; A Your Turn activity challenges students to connect to a primary source through a writing activity; Readers will be inspired as they learn how Jackie Robinson made a stand for equality and encouraged other minority athletes to join baseball and other sports. This 6-Pack includes six copies of this title and a lesson plan.

A brief biography of the man who was the first African American baseball player on a major league team, as well as the first African American elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The extraordinary life of Jackie Robinson is illuminated as never before in this full-scale biography by Arnold Rampersad, who was chosen by Jack's widow, Rachel, to tell her husband's story, and was given unprecedented access to his private papers. We are brought closer than we have ever been to the great ballplayer, a man of courage and quality who became a pivotal figure in the areas of race and civil rights. Born in the rural South, the son of a sharecropper, Robinson was reared in southern California. We see him blossom there as a student-athlete as he struggled against poverty and racism to uphold the beliefs instilled in him by his mother--faith in family, education, America, and God. We follow Robinson through World War II, when, in the first wave of racial integration in the armed forces, he was commissioned as an officer, then court-martialed after refusing to move to the back of a bus. After he plays in the Negro National League, we watch the opening of an all-American drama as, late in 1945, Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers recognized Jack as the right player to break baseball's color barrier--and the game was forever changed. Jack's never-before-published letters open up his relationship with his family, especially his wife, Rachel, whom he married just as his perilous venture of integrating baseball began. Her memories are a major resource of the narrative as we learn about the severe harassment Robinson endured from teammates and opponents alike; about death threats and exclusion; about joy and remarkable success. We watch his courageous response to abuse, first as a stoic endurer, then as a fighter who epitomized courage and defiance. We see his growing friendship with white players like Pee Wee Reese and the black teammates who followed in his footsteps, and his embrace by Brooklyn's fans. We follow his blazing career: 1947, Rookie of the Year; 1949, Most Valuable Player; six pennants in ten seasons, and 1962, induction into the Hall of Fame. But sports were merely one aspect of his life. We see his business ventures, his leading role in the community, his early support of Martin Luther King Jr., his commitment to the civil rights movement at a crucial stage in its evolution; his controversial associations with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Humphrey, Goldwater, Nelson Rockefeller, and Malcolm X. Rampersad's magnificent biography leaves us with an indelible image of a principled man who was passionate in his loyalties and opinions: a baseball player who could focus a crowd's attention as no one before or since; an activist at the crossroads of his people's struggle; a dedicated family man whose last years were plagued by illness and tragedy, and who died prematurely at fifty-two. He was a pathfinder, an American hero, and he now has the biography he deserves.

It was very unusual for a white kid to have a black hero in 1947, even in the more liberal parts of the country, such as the Oakland-San Francisco Bay Area, where I then lived. But it was while listening to the 1947 World Series between the New York Yankees and Brooklyn Dodgers on the radio that I adopted Jackie Robinson as my sports hero. All my friends were rooting for the Yankees, the All-American good guys who were led by "Joltin' Joe" DiMaggio, a "hometown" hero. The "bums" from Brooklyn were the bad guys. It seemed to play out as good vs. evil. This book will add a whole new dimension to Robinson's already awe-inspiring legacy. Yes, Jackie and Branch are both still heroes long after their deaths. Now, we learn more fully than ever before, there was an assist from God too.