An American Robinson Crusoe

The adaptation follows a young castaway who survives a shipwreck and spends years on an uninhabited island, fashioning tools, furniture, and shelters from natural materials; domesticating goats; learning farming, pottery, baking, fishing, and boatbuilding; keeping a diary; confronting illness, other shipwrecked people and hostile visitors; and finally achieving rescue and return. Episodes are organized as practical lessons in self-reliance, observation, and the progressive development of skills and domestic economy, and the text is shaped for classroom use with suggestive treatments for language, drawing, social history, and manual arts.