Flour Babies By: Anne Fine

Significance: This story teaches us that caring for a baby takes a lot of responsibility, And that you shouldn’t take your parents for granted. Or in this case parent. This story is about a kid named Simon Martin. His class is assigned to a project where you have to care for a flour baby, substituting a real baby, and keep a baby journal recording your journey. At first he isn’t so happy about this project, but later, he realizes that by not caring about the baby, He is more like his father who walked out on his childhood when he was young. Then he gets made fun for caring for the stupid project. This story taught me to respect my parents seeing how much trouble, and things that they gave up for me.

Perspective: This story was written by the author Anne Fine. The author is a lady, and I felt that she did a really good job explaining the story from a young boys perspective. The story was from Simon’s point of view, so we saw what he thought. It probably took place in the late 80’s, or early 90’s because most schools don’t do flour babies as a health project. Personally I would love to do a Flour Babies project.

Evidence: The author is clearly for Simon learning about why his father left him that he does literally anything to find out why. Like he convinces all of his classmates to finish the project by lying, and Simon rarely lies. At the beginning I didn’t know understand what the author was talking about when they said that Simon Martin (The main character) and Martin Simon got mixed up, and they were sent to the wrong classrooms. At first I kept reading Simon Martin, not Martin Simon.

Connection: There is a history of schools using flour babies to teach kids about early parenthood. I think that there isn’t any connection between Simon and me because I have both of my parents currently with me, and also Simon is considered a “hoodlum” and doesn’t really have a history of good grades, perfect attendance record, and such to his reputation. I think that I’m would be considered more of a “geek” kind of person. I can relate Simon’s teacher to one of my former teachers because he doesn’t care for the students work at all, and hates that he got stuck with the lowest student education group.

Supposition: If they made a sequel for this book I would really like it to talk about Simon finding his dad because the end only stated that he learned why his father walked out on him, and that he learned the lesson behind the whole flour babies scheme. If this story took place in our present time, I bet they would use mechanical baby dolls that monitor all that you do to the baby.