Tradition versus change: Candelight for Rebecca and Felicity Learns a lesson

So I was reading Felicity Learns a Lesson and one of the central plot points is whether or net Felicity should drink tea. It being 1774, Felicity's father becomes a patriot and she wants to be loyal to her father, but she takes tea lessons with Elizabeth and her older sister Annabelle Coles, and their family is loyalist. Does she drink the tea at lessons or not? This reminded me of another conflict in Rebecca's third book, Candlelight for Rebecca, in which Rebecca's class is making Christmas wreaths for decorations, but Rebecca's family is Jewish and celebrates Hanukkah. Does Rebecca make the decorations with the class, and if she does what will her family think?

Making connections like these across the books is really important in giving the books educational values. Connections like these, if made early on, will help children become more successful in future history classes. It emphasizes that, even though these two stories are of different girls from different times and cultures, this theme of keeping tradition in the face of change stays consistent throughout history. 

As an added bonus, here's a little something cool from a very old American Girl book.

I am so sorry for how blurry this is, it's late at night and I'm lazy.

This is a chart from a book called "Five Plays" published by Pleasant company in the early 1990s as a resource for teachers in teaching the american girl stories. On the front inside cover, there's this chart which allows you to see how the books all come together and why they were all written with the same title stems. If you read straight down, you can see changes across a specific era, but if you read from left to right, all the Meet, Learns a lesson, etc. then you can analyze broad changes across history. How cool! This system [sadly broken by Marie Grace and Cecile along with various other changes to the company/publishing patterns] was built to teach historical thinking skills.

The point being, that connections is what history should be about. When we think of a history class, we need to think of how all the stories connect to each other, and Pleasant Rowland along with countless authors and illustrators did an absolutely fantastic job of encouraging that.