The Little Prince

1943, Mariner Books - Harcourt, Inc.

""Good-bye," said the fox. "Here is my secret. It's quite simple: One sees clearly only with the heart. Anything essential is invisible to the eyes."
...
"People have forgotten this truth," the fox said. "But you mustn't forget it. You become responsible forever for what you've tamed. You're responsible for your rose ..."

"I'm responsible for my rose...," the little prince repeated, in order to remember.""

---

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

de Saint-Exupery (1900 - 1944) was a French aviator, journalist, author and poet. The Encyclopaedia Britannica refers to him as a "warrior who looked at adventure and danger with a poet’s eyes." de Saint-Exupery served in both World Wars as a pilot and helped to establish airmail routes in northwest Africa, the South Atlantic and in South America. His final flight was a reconnaissance mission over France in 1944; in 2004 wreckage recovered from the sea off of Marseilles was identified as belonging to de Saint-Exupery's plane.

A prolific writer, de Saint-Exupery earned many literary awards including the U.S. National Book Award. His work was banned in France by the Vichy government during the war, but, posthumously, he has been recognized for both his writing and flying in numerous ways by the French including several of his drawings from The Little Prince on the 50-franc banknote.

de Saint-Exupery is the only author I've reviewed thus far who has had a museum dedicated to honoring him: the Antoine de Saint-Exupery Museum in Tarfaya, Morocco founded in 2004 at the Cape Juby airfield and is devoted to his literary work.

---

Book Synopsis

The Little Prince, first published as Le Petit Prince, is a child's fable about a little prince who travels the universe looking for wisdom.

The story is told by a pilot who, crashed in the Saraha Desert, was surprised by the appearance of a small boy asking for a drawing of a sheep. The pilot must repair his ship in only eight days --  that is the amount of drinking water available -- during which time the Little Prince tells him the story of his love for a single rose on his home planet and his travels across the universe.

Le Petit Prince has been translated into hundreds of languages and sold more than 200 million copies worldwide making it one of the best-selling children's books in publishing history.

---

Middle chapter book readers, 87 pages.  A pilot crashed in the Sahara Desert encounters a small child who tells him the story of his travels across the universe in search of companionship and wisdom.

Learning Options

Family Read Aloud Time
The Little Prince is an excellent read-aloud at any time, but may be pertinent during our pandemic since it deals with loss and sorrow from both a child's and an adult's point of view.

Classroom Resource
The Prindle Institute of Ethics, a phenomenal resource for teaching children philosophy and ethics, offers a lesson unit on the concepts of authority, loneliness and ownership for the 3rd to 5th grades based on The Little Prince.

Learning at Home
The Little Prince is a wonderful book for a novel study unit covering plot, setting, personification, foreshadowing, alliteration, similes and the development of vocabulary.
Harcourt offers an Educator's Guide for The Little Prince which is also useful in creating a novel study for older children.

Finally, The Huffington Post published 5 Science-Backed Life Lessons from The Little Prince with numerous links to research and medical studies.  While not a home school lesson per se, it is possible to use the studies to develop science lessons for older students.

---