Details About Mrs. Reeder's Visit To Fourth Grade

In the fourth grade presentation, Mrs.Reeder talked about Moonshiner’s Son and Grandpa’s Mountain. She brought in a tobacco twist to represent Moonshiner’s Son, because the main character’s father chewed tobacco.

 

Carolyn, her husband Jack, and their kids hiked on the trail through the Shenandoah National Park. Their kids got tired of hiking the trail so many times, and so they hiked off the trails. When they did, they found old foundations, chimneys, and sometimes metal from tools and they wondered “Who lived here?”

They asked a park ranger and he told them. He got so tired of having to answer their questions, he gave them names of some people who had moved and how to contact them. So they did. That’s how they became interested in the people who were displaced from the Shenandoah National Park.

Then she told us that the cabin in Moonshiner’s Son was a real mountaineer cabin found in Corbin Hollow.

This is the man she imagined as the father in Moonshiner's Son.

The Appalachian Trail Club got permission from the park to restore it. Hikers can rent it. The Reeders have gone there and spent the night. In Moonshiner’s Son , when she tells about what the cabin smelled like, she was remembering what it smelled like from her night spent there.

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Mrs. Reeder told a story in her 4th grade presentation. She showed us a kaleidoscope and said writers have all these ideas, pieces of information and bits of stories that they mix up. She explained, “We twist them around in the kaleidoscope of our imagination, and that’s how we tell our stories.”

 

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