The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare

The Sign of the Beaver by Elizabeth George Speare, Houghton Mifflin, 1983, ISBN 0-395-33890-5, Newbery Award 1984
Publisher's Summary: Left alone to guard the family's wilderness home in 18th-century Maine, a boy is hard-pressed to survive until local Indians teach him their skills. Tags: frontier life, survival, Indians of North America
Newbery Read-Aloud section: Begin at Chapter 1, page 1. Go to bottom of page 2. Last sentence you read will be: "It hadn't been quite so easy as it had sounded back in their house in Quincy."

A note about Newberys:
Number one: I don't distinguish between the winners and the honor awards. We all know that sometimes the honor award winner is better than the medal winner. Can you say "Charlotte's Web"??? (It was an honor book the year it won. Can anyone tell me which book won the Newbery Medal that year?)
Number two: One of my fondest moments in my library career came during the week we build up to the Newbery Award being announced. We did a "Newbery Read-aloud Guessing game". We displayed about 15 Newberys (medal and honor winners), then , without telling them the name of the book, we read a portion of it and had the students guess which book the reading came from. It was lots of fun and the kids were very entertained. One student in particular, M.A., was absolutely taken with this book, The Sign of the Beaver. He flew through it, moved onto Gary Paulsen's Hatchet series, then onto some historical fiction about the Civil War. His mother told me later that he had not been much of a reader until he found this book. Now he is constantly reading. Smile.