Module 2: The Little House

Book Summary: This is a cute picture storybook about a house that begins in the country, then goes to the city and back to the country.  The little house was built very strong and on the top of a hill in the country. The house is curious is about what life would be like beyond the hill where she can see the city lights. Very soon, streets are built, then high-rise apartments, subways, railroads and sooner or later you can barely notice the house within the busy street life. One day the great, great, great-grandchild of the man who built the house walks by and notices the house and realizes it is the house her grandfather built.  She gets a moving company to lift the house up whole and moves it out into the country on another hill.  The house is remodeled and back to its original condition.


Reference: Burton,V. L. (1942). The little house. Boston,MA:Houghton Mufflin Company.


Impression: I could do nothing but smile and cry while reading this book.  It is such a warm and friendly book that makes you want to go out and purchase a nice country home.  I just want to get up and get away from the hustle and bustle of the city life to have some piece and quiet.  I never thought about the fact that in the city, you cannot hear the birds chirping or see the stars in the sky at night.  Matter of fact, I don't ever look up in the sky to notice because of all the actions going on around me.  I would recommend this book to ages 4-9 and grades K-3 because it can helped build vocabulary and the way the text flows in wavy lines and circles.  It helps to build the mood and setting of the book.

With this book being published in the 40's, it's illustrations are true to the time era.  I would categorized the illustrations as being naive, because of how theobjectsin the pictures are proportioned on the page.  You can get a good understanding of how the little house was started inthe country and as time traveled it disappeared.  The use of black and gray for the city subway, smoke and fog helped in contrasting the nostalgic feel of the little house on the hill.

Professional Reviews: 

Amazon.com Review

"Once upon a time there was a Little House way out in the country. She was a pretty Little House and she was strong and well built." So begins Virginia Lee Burton's classic The Little House, winner of the prestigious Caldecott Medal in 1943. The rosy-pink Little House, on a hill surrounded by apple trees, watches the days go, by from the first apple blossoms in the spring through the winter snows. Always faintly aware of the city's distant lights, she starts to notice the city encroaching on her bucolic existence. First a road appears, which brings horseless carriages and then trucks and steamrollers. Before long, more roads, bigger homes, apartment buildings, stores, and garages surround the Little House. Her family moves out and she finds herself alone in the middle of the city, where the artificial lights are so bright that the Little House can no longer see the sun or the moon. She often dreams of "the field of daisies and the apple trees dancing in the moonlight." Children will be saddened to see the lonely, claustrophobic, dilapidated house, but when a woman recognizes her and whisks her back to the country where she belongs, they will rejoice. Young readers are more likely to be drawn in by the whimsical, detailed drawings and the happy ending than by anything Burton might have been implying about the troubling effects of urbanization. (Ages 3 to 6)

From Kirkus Review
From what is available,this promises to be another beguiling book in the series which includes Choo Choo and Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel. Children have an instinctive personal feeling about houses, and the idea of the friendly little house that found itself forgotten when the city moved in on it will catch their imaginations. The pictures are in full color an on every page. Virginia Burton has a sense of pattern that makes her pictures almost like a tapestry.

References:

Kirkus Review. (1942). [Review of the book The little house, by V. L. Burton]. Retrieved from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/virginia-lee-burton/little-house-burton/

The Little House. (n.d.). [Review of the book The little house, by V. L. Burton]. Amazon.com. Retrieved from http://www.amazon.com/Little-House-Virginia-Lee-Burton-ebook/dp/B00DFM6COS/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1437279570&sr=1-1&keywords=the+little+house

Library Uses: This book could be used for Compare and Contrast Lesson with older students in the elementary.  You could also use this book as an art lesson to study the colors and lines of the illustrations. 

English teachers could use this book as a way to begin students writing poetry that may or may not rhyme. The flow of the words and use of vocabulary is very poetic in nature.

Module 2: Flotsam

Book Summary: This book is a wordless picture book about a little boy who finds this camera one day while playing on the beach. The camera looks very dated and the little boy takes the camera to have the film developed. Once he sees the pictures he notices that they are pictures of other children holding up another picture by the ocean with the camera.  The pictures seem todate all the way back to the early twentieth century.  He then realizes that it is chain reaction adn takes a picture of himself with the camera and throws it back into the ocean.

Reference: Wiesner, D. (2006). Flotsam. New York: Clarion Books.

Impression: I thought this book was awesome!!!! When I first looked through it I was confused on what was going on, until I got towards the end.  At that point, I went back to the beginning of the book and really started to enjoy the book.  It is like a fun game or mystery that you have to figure out using only pictures.  In the end it is a fun way to capture history and to keep the legacy of this old camera going.

The use of  bright colors gives you the mood of relaxed and carefree.  This is the feeling you wouuld have if you were on a beach in the sun.  The illustrator/author does a fantastic job of providing detailed lines and shapes when he is showcasing the sea animals underwater. You get a sense of actually being below the water with the darker yet vibrant colors of the ocean.

I would recommend this book to ages 4 and up only because it could be used in so many different facets.  This is just not a picture book but a piece of art!

Professional Reviews:

From Booklist
PreS-Gr. 2. As in his Caldecott Medal Book Tuesday (1991), Wiesner offers another exceptional, wordless picture book that finds wild magic in quiet, everyday settings. At the seaside, a boy holds a magnifying glass up to a flailing hermit crab; binoculars and a microscope lay nearby. The array of lenses signals the shifting viewpoints to come, and in the following panels, the boy discovers an old-fashioned camera, film intact. A trip to the photo store produces astonishing pictures: an octopus in an armchair holding story hour in a deep-sea parlor; tiny, green alien tourists peering at sea horses. There are portraits of children around the world and through the ages, each child holding another child's photo. After snapping his own image, the boy returns the camera to the sea, where it's carried on a journey to another child. Children may initially puzzle, along with the boy, over the mechanics of the camera and the connections between the photographed portraits. When closely observed, however, the masterful watercolors and ingeniously layered perspectives create a clear narrative, and viewers will eagerly fill in the story's wordless spaces with their own imagined story lines. Like Chris Van Allsburg's books and Wiesner's previous works, this visual wonder invites us to rethink how and what we see, out in the world and in our mind's eye.Gillian EngbergCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

From Kirkus ReviewFrom arguably the most inventive and cerebral visual storyteller in children’s literature, comes a wordless invitation to drift with the tide, with the story, with your eyes, with your imagination. A boy at the beach picks up a barnacle-encrusted underwater camera. He develops the film, which produces, first, pictures of a surreal undersea world filled with extraordinary details (i.e., giant starfish bestride the sea carrying mountainous islands on their backs), and then a portrait of a girl holding a picture of a boy holding a picture of another boy . . . and so on . . . and on. Finally, the boy needs a microscope to reveal portraits of children going back in time to a sepia portrait of a turn-of-the-century lad in knickers. The boy adds his own self-portrait to the others, casts the camera back into the waves, and it is carried by a sea creature back to its fantastic depths to be returned as flotsam for another child to find. In Wiesner’s much-honored style, the paintings are cinematic, coolly restrained and deliberate, beguiling in their sibylline images and limned with symbolic allusions. An invitation not to be resisted. (Picture book. 6-11)

References:
Fleishhacker, J. (n.d.). [Review of the book Flotsam, by D. Weisner]. Booklist. Retrieved from http://www.booklistonline.com/Flotsam-David-Wiesner/pid=1709229

Kirkus Review. (2006). [Review of the book Flotsam, by D. Weisner]. Retrieved from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/david-wiesner/flotsam/

Library Uses: This book would be great for the unit of inferencing for all grade levels.  The picture allow you to predict what could happen next.

I would also recommend this book as connecting curriculum by using thisbook as a display for Art Apprectiation Month.  This book could be used to make up your own story by using the pictures from the book.

Module 1: The Best Christmas Pageant Ever

Book Summary: The Herdman children are a group six brothers and sisters who you would want to call the police on because they are mean, rude and out of control.  Their father is not around because he jumped on a train and never came back, and their mother wants nothing to do with them, so she works long hours to avoid her children.  At school they bully everyone and even the teachers are fearful of their presence.  They are always trying to scheme and find a way to get something for free and one day Leroy Herdman finds out that the church gives refreshments at Sunday School.  The next Sunday, the Herdmans walked into church and the timing could not have been worse. It was time for the Christmas pageant, which is a major production in the town, and soon the Herdman's were going to be the stars!  Imogene threatened prissy-by-the-book Alice to not audition for Mary, which she does every year, and all the others took the remaining roles in the pageant.  Once they found out the story of the birth of Jesus, they put their on spin to the traditional Christmas story.  It ended up being the best pageant ever because it was genuine and innocent.  The Herdman's may have been terrors any other day, but this one time they truly were calm and gave The Best Christmas Pageant Ever!.

Reference: 

Robinson, B. (1972). The best Christmas pageant ever. New York, NY: Harper Collins.

Impressions: I thought this book was hilarious and realistic.  I could see so many of the children that I teach in the Herdman's and their innocence with not knowing about the birth of Jesus made the story intriguing.  There are many children who do not attend church and know about Christmas but do not know the reason behind it.  Robinson made this story suitable for school, church and home.  It is an easy reader for a chapter book and her black and white illustrations add character to the text.    I was able to picture the siblings and their antics better once I had a visual.  I am pretty sure this book would be controversial in school's because of the content, however, I feel it is a good depiction of research and learning of new traditions.  I would recommend this book to ages 8-12 and grades 3-8. That is a wide range, but I fell that age range would appreciate the humor and language in the book.

Professional Reviews:

From Kirkus Review
The young narrator, whose mother is saddled with directing the Church's annual Christmas pageant, becomes newly (but for the reader predictably) aware of the season's true meaning after the horrible Herdmans, a family of truly terrifying brats, bully themselves into the major roles -- Mary; Joseph, the Angel, the Wise Men -- and take their parts fervently if unconventionally to heart. By the starry, snow-soft ending this is revealed as the same old Christmas story after all (and really there was never a chance of any other outcome), but the Herdmans' outrages -- from setting fires, stealing, and blackmailing other children at home and school to burping the baby Jesus and bearing a ham (a more suitable offering in their hungry eyes than oil or perfume) at the pageant -- add enough spice to make this one livelier than most.

Reference:

Kirkus Review. (n.d.). [Review of the book The best christmas pageant ever, by B. Robinson]. Retrieved from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/barbara-robinson-4/the-best-christmas-pageant-ever/

Library uses: I would use this story to show their different traditions that are celebrated around Christmas time in a school setting.

In a church setting this book would be great to read in a junior class to break up the monotony of the Christmas story that is told every year in the same way.

Module 1: Interrupting Chicken

Book Summary:  This is colorful and joyful picture storybook of an enthusiastic, smart and helpful little red chicken who lives with her father, Papa, and likes to hear bedtime stories before she goes to bed.  The only problem is that little red chicken cannot seem to just sit and listen to the story that Papa reads.  Once Papa begins the story and gets to a part of the story that may be harmful to the character, little red chicken interrupts him and tells the story character what to do.  Then the story ends and the characters are saved from danger.  Papa keeps telling little red chicken that she has to sit and listen but she only wants to help out the character because she knows will happen.  After Papa reads three stories, he tells little red chicken that they are out of stories and it was time for bed.  Little red chicken protests and Papa then tells her to read him a story instead.  He makes up a story and pretty soon Papa has fallen asleep.  Little red chicken then climbs into bed with Papa and FINALLY goes to sleep.

Reference: Stein, D. E. (2010). Interrupting chicken. New York, NY: Scholastic, Inc.

Impressions: I though this book was hilarious and very true when it comes to a child who wants to "help out".  Little red chicken was so anxious to tell the characters about what was to come, all the while frustrating Papa.  Stein truly captured how a parent feels when they are battling with their child and keeps pushing even when they want to throw in the towel. This book would fall under realistic fiction only for the mere fact that I immediately thought of my own experiences as a parent dealing with my anxious child.  You can relate to the story 100% if you are a parent, in my opinion.

The illustrations were phenomenal and filled the pages with bright colors of red, blue and yellow. The style of illustration leaned more towards collage because it seemed as if the pictures were three-dimensional and a texture of paper figures.

He gave humor to serious literature and I can see a child cracking up laughing at how little red chicken interrupts every story. He incorporated classic tales in his stories that a parent would have heard as child and made them modern.  I will definitely be reading this story to my own children and students at my school. Also, I highly recommend this book to ages 4-8 and parents who like to read to their child at bedtime with an anxious listener.

Professional Reviews: 
From Booklist

At bedtime, Papa prepares to read an old favorite to the little red chicken, but before beginning, he reminds her not to interrupt the story. Reassured, he begins “Hansel and Gretel,” but just as the two children approach the witch’s house, up pops the little red chicken, exclaiming “‘DON’T GO IN! SHE’S A WITCH!’ . . . THE END!” Two more attempted bedtime stories end abruptly with the little red chicken saving Little Red Riding Hood and Chicken Little. The childlike humor of this wonderfully illustrated picture book will bring belly laughs from kids, particularly those who know the original stories. Stein uses page turns dramatically to build tension, which is released each time the chicken interrupts and amends a fairy tale. Differences in medium and style differentiate between scenes taking place in the folktales and in the main story. Created with watercolor, water-soluble crayon, and pen and ink, the illustrations are vivid and dramatic. Great fun for reading aloud. Preschool-Grade 3. --Carolyn Phelan

From Kirkus ReviewDespite repeated vows to stop interrupting, a little red chicken can’t resist jumping in to cut her Papa’s bedtime tales short with plot giveaways—“DON’T GO IN! SHE’S A WITCH!”—and truncated, happy endings. Endowing his poultry with flamboyantly oversized combs and wattles, Stein switches between stylish but cozy bedroom scenes and illustrations from each attempted story (into which little red chicken forcibly inserts herself) done in a scribbly, line-and-color style reminiscent of Paul Galdone’s picture-book fairy tales. Having run out of stories, exasperated Papa suggests to little red chicken that she make one up for him, which she does in laborious block print on lined paper, complete with crayoned stick-figure illustrations. Closing with an intimate snuggle after Papa instantly dozes off, this tender iteration of a familiar nighttime ritual will be equally welcomed by fond parents and those children for whom listening to stories is anything but a passive activity. (Picture book. 4-6)

References:
Kirkus Review. (2010). [Review of the book Interrupting chicken, by D. E. Stein]. Retrieved from https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/david-ezra-stein/interrupting-chicken/

Phelan, C. (n.d.). [Review of the book Interrupting chicken, by D.E. Stein].  Booklist Retrieved from http://www.booklistonline.com/Interrupting-Chicken-David-Ezra-Stein/pid=4138434

Library uses: This book would be great for compare and contrast or a lesson on single parent homes.  It could also be a great book on the color spectrum for an art class.