Favorite Children's Book

I have many favorite books, but I think I have to go with the Harry Potter series as my all time favorite. I can’t pick just one since the whole story is really what I love. I began reading these books when the third book came out and I was 11 years old. I really feel like I grew up with them since the last book wasn’t released until I was almost 20. I read my copy of Harry Potter 4 so many times that it is currently being held together with duct tape.

If you have been hiding under a rock for the past 15 years and haven't heard of Harry Potter, it is a series about an orphan boy who discovers he is a wizard and is shipped of to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry to learn how to be a wizard. He often gets himself into trouble and comes face to face on many occasion with the most evil dark wizard of all time, He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named, aka Voldemort. Besides Voldemort, he has lots of enemies and conflicts as well as some amazing friendships with the most peculiar of people.

The Harry Potter series is a wonderful story of friendship and perseverance and adventure. While the blockbuster movies did a good job, I still think they are nothing compared to the magic of the books. I have often heard of controversy surrounding Harry Potter and people not wanting their kids to read it because it is about witchcraft. I think that as long as we talk to our kids about fact vs. fiction there is no reason they can't read books like Harry Potter. 

Read Aloud Video

I created a youtube video of me doing my read aloud. Here is the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e3_hN4fRNTU

I think the biggest challenge I might encounter when reading aloud is students’ different exposures to literature. Kids bring their own background knowledge and experiences to stories read aloud and they all react differently. There is no way I could prepare for each students’ response to the book. Also, students can only sit for certain amounts of time and I feel as though society has fostered children to have short attention spans. Getting them to focus on a story for more than ten minutes is sometimes impossible. (And people wonder why students get super antsy and do a poor job sitting for an hour taking TCAP tests.) Children also no longer have any imagination! They never get bored because as soon a s they are bored an adult finds something to entertain them. They are in a world where everything is entertaining them. They don’t need to imagine or make up games when they can play video games that have already been imagined for them. I foresee this being a real problem in the future. Read aloud and reading in general is a remedy for this. Reading takes kids into new worlds where they get to use their imagination to furnish the universe. Read aloud is beneficial as a model for students to hear great reading. It is also just enjoyable. I tell my third graders when I am reading aloud as part of a lesson (as more of a think aloud) they need to be sitting up and focusing, but every day I do read aloud just for fun and the students can sit with stuffed animals and lay down on the floor and I turn down the lights. I want students to just enjoy the written word and use their imaginations.

Here is the link for my read aloud poem:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88OZJnoQdaY

Pick a Picture Book

I absolutely love The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, by Chris Van Allsburg. This book is a series of illustrations with a title and a picture caption. The pictures do not go together, but rather they are all pictures out of different books that haven’t actually been written. This book is fantastic to use with creative writing. If you put up just one of the pictures, all of your students could write a different fantasy story based on that one picture and caption. It could be a really cool lesson in creativity to share all the different places students took their stories based on the same image. It could also be a cool character lesson to show that we all have different backgrounds and have had different experiences and even though we are seeing the same picture, we are all seeing it differently. We are all unique and none of the answers are wrong, just different, and really great to share with our friends.

My favorite image in this book is titled A Strange Day in July. The picture caption reads, “He threw with all his might but the third stone came skipping back.” The picture is in black and white. There is a boy who looks to be about eight years old and a girl who looks six or seven. You can’t see either of their faces because their backs are turned to us. You can see just a bit of sandy beach at the bottom of the page. There are large rocks in the sand and some wild grass sticking out here and there. The whole top of the page is water, and the sun is shining on the water so spectacularly. There are sun spots glistening all over the water so that you can tell is a sun shiny day. However, neither child is dressed for a day at the beach: the boy is wearing long pants and a long sleeved shirt. The girls is wearing a fancy light colored dress. It looks like she could wear it in a wedding or to church on Sunday. Both of their hair is shining in the sunlight as well. There is one rock hovering over the water. You can’t tell if it is skipping away or towards the beach. 

Variations on Traditional Literature

I chose to find variations on the traditional story of The Three Little Pigs. The three books I selected were The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig by Eugene Trivizas, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka, and The Three Pigs by David Weisner.

Trivizas’ The Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig is a character swap on the traditional three little pigs story. The three little wolves are building their houses all together out of much sturdier materials than in the traditional tale. With that element of this story, I would discuss teamwork with my students and how two heads (and three) are better than one. Any version of the three little pigs has to have good character lessons built in. There is always a bully character in the story and that spins off to how my students can handle bullies in their lives. I was very surprised by the ending of this story though. After building three strong houses and having the pig destroy them all, the wolves build a house of flowers. Smelling the flowers changes the pig’s heart. This is a great place to teach about plot twists, and this particular plot twist lends itself to teaching about redemption and how even the most unlikely of people can turn over a new leaf and start anew.

Scieszka ‘s The True Story of the Three Little Pigs is also a story where the wolf is the protagonist and the “good guy.” The wolf is telling the story of how he had a cold and was out looking for a cup of sugar to bake his granny a birthday cake. He inadvertently blows down the houses and eats the pigs, and lands himself in jail. I would absolutely use this book to teach my students about point of view. This story is very similar to the traditional tale, except from the wolf’s point of view. For example, in original stories the evil wolf blows the houses down and eats the pigs. In Scieszka’s version the wolf accidently blows the houses down and eats the pigs because they were already dead. In either case the facts are the same. What changes is whose side you take.  I could also use a Venn diagram to compare this story to the traditional story.

I think that the three little wolves story is a more modern twist on the original version. Nowadays we like there to be neat and tidy happy endings where the bad guy can choose to be good after all. In The True Story, the wolf still ends up in trouble and two of the pigs are still dead. So the way the two versions end the story is very different from each other.

The Three Pigs by David Weisner is a very different take on the tale. The basic story begins the same, but then as you go along, Weisner starts messing with the fourth wall between the audience and the characters. The pigs find themselves coming out of the pages of their story and into the pages of other stories. The art in this book is beautiful and the book has won the Caldecott Medal. There are also different illustration styles for each story the pigs step into. This book is the most different of all three versions of The Three Little Pigs I read. After just the first page, the direction of the story completely changes. I think that this would not be a good book to compare and contrast to the original story. It would also be difficult to teach story elements with this book because the story is so fractured and doesn’t follow a typical arc. But it is a great book to read just for fun.

I find it interesting that there are so many stories (two of the three I selected) that portray the wolf not as the “bad guy.” This may have something to do with the fact that this story has been around for so long that authors have had time to do lots of different things with it. You can only tell the same story so many times before nobody really pays attention to it anymore. Also, the wolf is so often stuck in a stereotype of being the bad guy in fairy tales. It is good to get kids (and adults) thinking outside the box when it comes to characters and people they meet.