Picture Books!

I've been reading a bunch of picture books lately. I really love picture books and plan to use them a lot in my classroom this year. Here are some of my favorites:

The World Champion of Staying Awake (Sean Taylor and Jimmy Liao)

Stella needs to get her toys to go to sleep. Imagination and storytelling finally does the trick. Really cute book!

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Little Ant, Big Thinker - or - Where Does the Ocean End?
(Andrew Usatschow/Alexandra Junge)

I love this book. The little ant, and his elephant friend are trying to figure out how they can see the end of the ocean. Along comes a fish who tells them that it ends right here. Talk about perspective!! It's a simple book but could be a great starter for interesting discussions about thinking and perspective.

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How Rocket Learned to Read (Tad Hills)

Rocket is a carefree little puppy who happens to run into an old bird set on being a teacher. (okay...that's my interpretation...in the book she's really just called a little yellow bird...but I think of her as an old bird because she's so bossy!) Rocket finds it hard to argue with her and eventually does become her student. She hooks him by reading stories to him! Rocket does learn to read, and he learns to love to read books again, and again, and again!



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Zoom (Tim Wynne-Jones/Eric Beddows)

This picture book is for kids with a good attention span! It is 100 pages long. It would be a good way to encourage attention and celebrate being able to read a book that is 100 pages long.

I think this is part of a series. I found a number of Zoom books on the internet when googling for a picture. I loved the illustrations in this book - black and white and great detail. Beautiful!

This book made me laugh right from page 1 where Zoom, the cat, straps wooden spoons to his paws so he can play in water. A cat playing in the water?! I love it! This book is full of different adventures Zoom gets involved with - traveling to the sea, to the North Pole, and ancient Egyptian ruins.

As I was reading this book it suddenly struck me that this would be a great way to introduce Book Club to my Grade 3's this year. In each of Zoom's adventures he actually doesn't leave home (you'll have to read it to see how that happens!) And in his last adventure he gets there through a great staircase of books - great symbolism! I could read this book, talk about Zoom's adventures, and how reading lets us go to all sorts of places. I could talk about where the Grade 3's went last year, and then invite them to join book club. Ooohhh....it makes me excited!



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