Baseball Saved Us

Title: Baseball Saved Us


Author: Ken Mochizuki


Illustrator: Dom Lee


Publisher & Publication Date: Lee & Low Books, 1993


Genre: Picture book, Historical fiction, Multicultural


Age Range: K-3

Summary: This book is about the Japanese Americans that were in an internment camp. The little boy was made fun of at school and then he was taken from his home. He was not allowed to have any of his belongings. His dad finally came up with something that saved them from going insane while at the camp. He made a baseball field out of the open dirt. The little boy wasn't very good at the sport, but ended up doing okay and helping his team win. He even played on the baseball team at his school when he got out of the camp, he ended up hitting the winning run for his team.


Response: I enjoyed this book. I think it would be a good book to read to younger children who sometimes feel out of place. It shows that even a small child can overcome being different. It was moving the way the Japanese family managed to leave the camp and still have hope. It made me think of the books Grandfather's Journey and Weedflower. I read the information about the illustrations and it says that they were acquired by using beeswax on paper, and then scratching out the images, and then using oil paints for color. Most of the illustrations were single-page spreads, but some of them stretched over to be almost complete double-page spreads. It also said that some of the illustrations were inspired by actually photographs of the internment camps. I thought the illustrations were really well done.


Teaching Ideas: This book could be used to follow up with the Japanese unit. You could start a World War II unit and end the Japanese unit with this book. It would be a good resource to use for an alternative look at WWII. After you read the story you could have the students write down things they would want to take with them if they were all of a sudden force-relocated. Then have them make a tough decision of the one thing they would want to take with them, only one item. Ask them how they would feel and have them draw pictures to go along with what they talked about and wrote down.