If America Were a Village: A Book about the People of the United States

By David J. Smith
Illustrated by Shelagh Armstrong

This wonderful nonfiction children's book explains what America would be like if it were a village of 100 people.  Each page is headed with a question, such as Who are we?  Where do we come from? What religions do we practice?  How old are we? How healthy are we?  Then, each page breaks down the demographics.  For example, the page Where do we come from? states the following:

"America is a country of immigrants.  Almost every person in the United States can trace ancestors back to other parts of the world.  If the America today were a village of 100: 15 would be of German ancestry, 11 would be of Irish ancestry, 9 African, 9 English, 7 Mexican, 6 Italian, 3 Polish, 3 French, 3 Native American, 2 Scottish, 2 Dutch, 2 Norwegian, 1 Scotch-Irish, and 1 Swedish.  The rest have other backgrounds.  This is quite a change from when the first U.S. census was taken in 1790.  If American had been a village of 100 in 1790, 53 would have come from England, 19 from Africa (most of them slaves), 11 from Scotland and Ireland, and 7 from Germany.  The rest had various backgrounds, including French, Swedish, and Native."

I thought this was a really interesting book because it breaks down a lot of facts about Americans and puts them into terms that everyone (even children) can understand.  And in addition to just listing those simple facts, it offers a lot of other information about our past, our diversity, how America compares to other countries, etc.  I think this would be a great book to use in the classroom for a variety of reasons.  It offers lessons on history.  It offers lessons about different cultures and diversity.  And it would also be an excellent way to give a math lesson on percentages.  The information on any one of these pages could easily be turned into a pie-chart as a student project.

In addition to the wealth of information in this book, it also wins points for being up-to-date (it was published in 2009) and for having beautiful, colorful paintings on each page.  If America Were a Village is really a wonderfully put together piece of work.