Martina is a beautiful cockroach living in Cuba who needs to find a husband. Her abuela gives her some shocking advice. This is to spill coffee on each of the suitors to see how they react. Martina goes through several suitors who each react poorly to the coffee test, until she meets a mouse named Perez. Perez is a gentle, soft-spoken mouse who turns the coffee test on Martina and ultimately wins her heart.
Deedy gives us a sweetly humorous story about the trials of finding the perfect person to spend the rest of our life with in this retold Cuban folktale. Illustrator Michael Austin gives the book soft rounded shapes and colors. It sets the romantic mood of the story. Martina the Beautiful Cockroach won the Pura Belpre medal (honor book) in 2008.
Martina the Beautiful Cockroach provides endless language lessons, containing puns, Spanish words, and onomatopoeias.
An orphaned Native American girl named She Who Is Alone and her tribe are suffering from a terrible drought. It is decided that everyone must sacrifice what is most precious to them in order to appease the Great Spirits. She sacrifices her only possession reminding her of her deceased parents, a doll with jay bird feathers. Afterwards, the tribe wakes up to find the hills covered with bluebonnets.
DePaola retells this heart warming old Texas tale. He illustrates this story and often covers full pages with soft colors and vibrant blues that catch your eye.
There are numerous activities that you can do with this book from Native American studies to botany. Students of all ages are engrossed with this story.
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Max is a little boy who gets in trouble for being disrespectful. He is sent to his room without his supper. While in his room he imagines that she sails away to an island filled with wild creatures. When he comes back to reality he is still in his room with his supper waiting for him.
Sendak pulls you into Max's imagination and you really feel his adventure with him. The creatures on the island are wonderfully drawn with soft colors and pen, making it feel dreamy and almost unreal. His illustrations cover a full page with short text, black on a white background, fill the opposite page. This gives you a sense that the illustrations are viewed equally to the text.
After many years of proposals to turn Where the Wild Things Are into a film, Sendak allowed Spike Jonze to create a live action film. You can find the trailer for the film by following the link. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01-PqqifyjA
Singer writes a book of poems often with a fairy tale twist. After she writes the poem, she reverses it, giving it a completely different meaning. The reversals use the same words but with different capitalization and punctuation.
Josée Masse illustrated this story using very vibrant and often color blocking techniques. Each story is really two in one, so Masse splits his illustrations in half just as the poems are split. The art on one side uses softer and brighter colors that promote a different mood from the flipped poem. This technique unifies both poems, but subtly shows the difference.
This is a fun and quirky way to introduce students to poetry and twisted fairy tales. If you visit the following link, you will be taken to a lesson plan that uses one poem a day for a two week poetry unit. Each lesson provides cross curricular activities, technology activities, and offers common core alignment. https://www.teachervision.com/lesson-plan/printable/72890.html
Wiesner, D. (2001). The three pigs. New York, NY: Clarion.
The three little pigs begins as the traditional children's story, but once the wolf begins huffing and puffing, he blows the pigs right out of the story. The pigs then explore several other books, and befriend a dragon. They return home to their own story with the dragon and live happily ever after with the dragon scaring away the big bad wolf.
Wiesner created a sublimely sweet twisted tale with this book. The illustrations are held in large boxes that the pigs ultimately escape from. The boxes restrict the story in the beginning, but Wiesner soon breaks free from the conventions of picture book illustrations. He allows the characters to run free. He keeps the colors muted and simple, letting the composition speak louder. It causes the book to come alive and leaves you wondering where these curious pigs will go next. Wiesner won the Caldecott Medal for illustration in 2002.
This book lends itself to some wonderful comparing and contrasting lesson plans with other little pig stories.
Monkey is reading a book when he is interrupted by Jackass. Jackass pesters Monkey constantly asking if it can do things that his computer can. Monkey, becoming fed up with Jackass' questions, finally shows him the book. Jackass becomes enthralled with the book leaving Monkey to go to the library to get a new book.
Smith uses simple sentences and often one word to express the main character's frustration with the comparison of technology to a book. The illustrations are simple and often focus on the main character's eyes and eyebrows to show emotion. The text composition surrounds the illustration, noting that the illustrations are equally important and should really be read along with the text. The simple lines that Smith uses, show subtle changes in the characters on the page.
This book has quite a bit of controversy surrounding it for the use of the word jackass.There are so many sides to the debate of this book. I certainly cannot persuade you to go one way or another. I would encourage you, however, to watch the author's commentary about his use of the word jackass in a children's book. http://youtu.be/e0hNlYw1Uko
A small fish steals a much larger fish's hat. He plans his getaway, and hides in the tall grass. He is unaware that the much larger fish is following him the entire way. The much larger fish ultimately ends up getting his hat back.Klassen tells a tale of someone doing something wrong and not getting away with it
The illustrations are muted earth tones on a solid black background. There are small changes to the illustrations, small air bubbles that follow the fish as they swim. These small air bubbles give the illustrations movement, small, and deliberate, but movement that catches your eye. He won the Caldecott Medal in 2013.
This story lends itself to readers theater and plays in the classroom. Students will have fun reading the sneaky little fish's lines and use facial expressions to act it out.
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