Piggybook: A Review

Review by Scott Tingley

I am a grade 3 teacher and I was at a Professional Development session on Guided Reading this afternoon and the teacher giving the session was one of my supervising teachers when I took my teaching degree twelve years ago (my, how time flies!). I respect this teacher a great deal, so when she started pulling out story books that we could use for specific comprehension activities I paid close attention.

Then she took out one of the ugliest books I have ever seen. It had an interesting illustration in the middle of a couple of boys and a grown man on the back of a woman (obviously the males on the back of the mother), but the when coupled with the awful looking border, I was turned off on the book right away. Yea, I was judging the book by the cover – it was so ugly, I had no choice. I wouldn’t have even read it on my own, but this teacher was bound and determined to read it to all of us.

She loved this book for a lot of reasons. She loved all of the lesson ideas a teacher could get out of it. She loved how it could be used for a grade 4 and 5 art lesson (famous paintings morph as the story progresses). She loved how even though there are amazing changes happening within story, no explanation is given, which makes the questions the kids can ask and answer richer. She really loved the vocabulary the book offered. She really loved a lot of stuff about the book.

I hated the cover.

I even hated the back cover.

Then she read the book. She was almost giddy that she had the opportunity to share this ugly looking book. I was not impressed.

Then she read the book.

Piggybook turned out to be one of the most stunning and troubling kids books I have ever had the fortune of reading. Basically the book is about a husband and two young boys that treat their wife/mother like the hired help. Like hired help that can’t ever quit…but then she quits. Left for themselves, the other three slowly morph into the pigs that they are. The house changes, the language in the narration changes. That’s the clever stuff. Anthony Browne does a really nice job of writing and illustrating these changes.

The troubling part is in how none of this really seems to be played for laughs. There are four panel scenes early on showing the mother at work – never with her family – always at work. The boys are in full colour, but the mother is always in this sepia yellow – and alone. And you never really see the features on her face. She is a non-entity – she is unimportant in her own life. She has no ears or mouth and her eyes are only slits. This is a woman beaten down. Then she leaves. The guys fall apart. She comes back – they are pigs and with her rights asserted she is the beautiful young mother she always was supposed to be.

This is a book rich with possibilities. I imagine that it might spark some hard conversations about inequalities and divorce. Some of the teachers made jokes about their husbands being like the man but that sort of thing should not be acceptable when using this book.

I don’t have a copy of Piggybook in front of me, so I may have gotten a couple of details wrong. Also, I always review brand new books on this blog, but this one came out in 1990, so you may have a copy in your school or library already, but if not, Random House has it for sale HERE.

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A Remembrance Day Flower Story Not About Poppies: A Bloom of Friendship Review

Review by Scott Tingley

Yay, PRIMARY DOCCUMENTS!!

I’ll come back to that.

Tomorrow night my wife and I plan on attending the new Canadian movie, Passchendaele. If you are Canadian and you aren’t sure if the movie is going to be set in World War I or WWII, the rule of thumb is that if you have heard the name of the battle, and that battle isn’t Dieppe, then it was in WWI.

That really annoys me. I may not have encyclopedic knowledge of Canada’s military heritage, but the majority of us Canadians have little or no understanding of what our countrymen (and women) have endured on the world’s battlefields and at home. We were feared. We were loved. In the past few years (10?) there has been a push to get people out to Remembrance Day celebrations, but I still don’t find that knowledge of specific events has gone up.

A Bloom of Friendship: The Story of the Canadian Tulip Festival by Anne Renaud and Ashley Spires does a nice job of filling a little part of this void for teachers and the young readers they...teach.

Basically, Bloom tells this story that I got from Wikipedia: In 1945, the Dutch royal family sent 100,000 tulip bulbs to Ottawa in gratitude for Canadians having sheltered Princess Juliana and her daughters for the preceding three years during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, in the Second World War.

The most noteworthy event during their time in Canada was the birth in 1943 of Princess Margriet to Princess Juliana at the Ottawa Civic Hospital. The maternity ward was declared to be officially a temporary part of the Netherlands, so that the birth could formally be claimed to have occurred on Dutch territory. In 1946, Juliana sent another 20,500 bulbs requesting that a display be created for the hospital, and promised to send 10,000 more bulbs each year.

In telling this story the book tells a big part of the story of WWII and Canada’s part in it.

When I fist saw the cover of Bloom, I was hoping it would be a storybook that I could use with early elementary kids, but instead I got so much more. Primary Documents! I didn’t know what a primary document was until University, but this book is full of them. Newspaper clippings and photos are interspersed with chunks of text and “Instant History Facts” to tell the story of the Dutch royal family, Canada’s battle experience in Holland and the whole war in general.

I am very impressed with this book, and I am going to ask my principal to order multiple copies for next year’s Rembrance Day studies (and if I get them this year we will use it whenever).

I will be using the book with my grade 3 class over the next few weeks and I would highly recommend it for upper elementary and middle school students. Even though the cover and format will likely come across as too kid-ish for the middle schoolers it can still be a good teacher resource. As much as I like the internal pictures by Spires, I wish a different cover image was used. I wonder if older elementary and early middle school students will be receptive to a book that, at first glance, looks like a primary storybook.

ISBN: 978-1-897073-35-3, Non-fiction, Ages: 9 – 12, paperback and hardcover, 24 pages, Reading level: 7.4 (AR)

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A Review of Wilbur and the Moose, and an Accidental Review of Bubba the Cowboy Prince - Or - Get Ready for All Kinds of Cowboy Awesomeness!

Review by Scott Tingley

I teach third grade. I have a new batch of students this year and I have to decide something. When will I treat them to the greatest story reading of all time?

I think most teachers have something they secretly think they are amazing at. Maybe one thinks that no one teaches sentence structure like them, or that they teach Trigonometric Functions like a rock star. I’ve got a couple of things I do pretty well (keeping my desk clean is one of them….lying on the internet, apparently, is another), and reading Bubba the Cowboy Prince is another. I put on my black cowboy hat, my dark green bandana and my silver bolo tie; then I pull out the awful cowboy accent (including a truly horrendous John Wayne impression I use for the Fairy God Cow) – it’s awesome.

But, this is not a review for Bubba the Cowboy Prince…well I guess it sort of is, isn’t it? Bubba the Cowboy Prince, by Helen Ketteman and James Warhola is an amazing book to read out loud, with crazy cowboy slang and plenty of silly details in the art to keep the kids giggling every time you or they read it.

The dilemma I am facing is that I have all the gear: hat, tie, bandana, Roy Rogers six-shooters even…but only one cowboy themed book to read. I’ve tried. There have been some very valiant efforts by some very big names in the children’s book universe, but none have met my exacting standards…basically, if a John Wayne or Walter Brennan impression doesn’t fit in while reading it, then no go.

The question is, will the newest printing of the 1989 book, The Ballad of Wilbur and the Moose by John Stadler make it or not?

Well, does the song Big Bad John mean anything to you? If not, listen here and come back. You’re reading this on a screen, It’s not going anywhere.

Okay, so basically if you add a chorus of “Big Blue Moose” to every page you have a cowboy kid’s book at least on par with Bubba. I think the reading calls for something a little subtler than John Wayne; more Tennessee Ernie Ford – just channel your inner cowboy-poet and you will be fine.

The Ballad of Wilbur and the Moose is a cowboy story-song about Wilbur Little and his Big Blue Moose. They have cowboy adventures involving boxing matches, trains, deserts, a bad guy with one of those little mustaches perfect for twirling, a crooked card game and a gang of pig-rustlers. Oh, and lots of lime juice.

Final words? I can’t wait to read this to my students in a week or so….now if I can only train them to do the chorus…”Big Moose, Big Moose, BIG BLUE MOOSE…Big Moose.”

It will be like Rio Bravo meets The Good The Bad and The Ugly meets, I don’t know, Yo! Gabba Gabba – and that adds up to all kinds of cowboy awesomeness.

· $14.99 us
· ISBN: 978-0-375-84174-3 (0-375-84174-1)

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Two Chinese New Year Picture Books: A Short Review

Review by Scott Tingley - August 09, 2008

I have no idea why, but my-oh-my does my not-yet-four-year-old girl like reading story books about Chinese New Years. It is bed time for her; I just read Bringing in the New Year by Grace Lin, My First Chinese New Year by Karen Katzby twice each, and she is in her room right now reading the two of them again. She loves books, but there is something that is drawing her to these books lately.

The sense of family is strong throughout both of these beautifully illustrated and lavishly colored picture books, which seems to appeal to my daughter. Both are jammed packed with illustrations, with Bringing in getting the edge. Both are informative, with My First getting the edge. Also, and just as importantly, they are both fairly quick reads (something that is very important for evening readings).

These are both terrific and informative picture books, and I don’t really think you could go wrong choosing one over the other. They would be perfect for introducing Chinese New Years to an elementary class, and they would be nice additions to any home’s library.

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Michael Recycle: A Review - or - We Rock and That Other Grade 3 Doesn’t Rock Quite As Much - or - They Won’t Take the Cans Here If We Crush Them First

Article by Scott Tingley - July 25, 2008

This year my grade three class turned about a fifth of our classroom into a class-garden. We had tomatoes and green and jalapeno peppers, basil and cilantro, cosmos and five-foot + sunflowers, very tiny carrots and corn from Orville Redenbacher corn kernels (which made tiny, but real ears of corn). We didn’t start until after the Christmas break, and curriculum responsibilities and an unusual number of snowstorms meant that we were not able to transplant the small plants in a timely manner, but we ended up with a pretty impressive spread.

The grade one teacher at my school from this past year is transferring to a grade three class at another school. We were talking back and forth about 3^rd grade stuff and the idea of having competing class gardens came up. The idea, I think, will be to grow enough peppers, tomatoes, and maybe even onions/garlic to make a pot of class grown – homemade spaghetti sauce.

We are going to win, by the way.

This teacher was in charge of our school’s recycling program and that job is passing to me this coming year, so I’m thinking of including a mulch challenge to our competition. We’ll make our own fertilizer and grow some awesome plants. Worms and rotting produce = a well rounded education. We are going to wipe the floor, in a very friendly way, with that other class.

I mention all this for a couple reasons. Firstly: Any longtime readers will know that it takes me a log of meandering to actually get to a review. I sort of take my time portaging my way around my stream of thought before finishing off with something resembling a review. Secondly: Michael Recycle, by Ellie Bethel and Alexandra Colombo inspired the concept of our little two-school competition….that we are going to win.

Michael Recycle is set in a grimy town that has been overtaken by trash - that is, until a green-caped crusader, Michael Recycle, arrives, declaring "You must stop this now! You've got to act soon. The towers of trash reach up to the moon!" Inspired by the "super-green hero," town members react by creating a "Be Greener Campaign," which includes recycling, growing their own vegetables and collecting rain for reuse. (From IDWpublishing.com)

The title character doesn’t really do a whole lot in the story, which is actually kind of nice, and because of this it gets a higher recommendation than it would if the hero fixed all the problems, or if the hero “held the hands” of the townsfolk while they made the changes. Michael provides the inspiration by telling the town that they need to change, and the town does the rest. This is what is happening now. We are being told to change by reliable sources and then it is up to us to listen and change.

The common sense lesson that I take away is that we can’t expect anyone to be the hero besides us. We can make a difference. I like it.

Michael Recycle was actually out in time for this past Earth Day, but I never got around to it until now….I mean I left it until now so that you interested teachers could pick up this book over the summer and make a plan to implement the concepts and ideas into your own class and/or school. Recycle cans and paper? Of course. Reuse old junk? What teacher/school doesn’t find uses for everything until it falls apart? But we can maybe do more. Grow food? Great idea, especially if you have windows in the right spot, or the right climate for a school garden. Save rainwater to water plants? What a great idea! It wouldn’t take much, and snow, for us, would be even easier to collect. A general change in attitudes? It’s worth a try.

I thought it was clever of the book to include GREEN ideas after the conclusion of the story. Some are pretty obvious, but there are some that are pretty obvious and often ignored: like turning off the faucet while brushing your teeth, or turning off the computer when you are not using it (are the computers shut off in your school when everyone goes home?).

I like this book, and it is going to be one of the first ones I read to my class this September. Collecting rain water at school. Brilliant!

IDW Publishing

· ISBN-10: 1845392817

· ISBN-13: 978-1845392819

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Nit-Pickin’ -or- My Wife Is Not Allowed to Read This Book.

Article by Scott Tingley - May 10, 2008

My wife is not allowed to read this book.

When he gets married, the responsible, yet tricky husband will grab up all the jobs that need doing – but that he doesn’t really mind doing. The big chores I snapped up were: dishes, laundry and cooking; leaving my wife the various floor jobs and a few other things that I am horrible at. It has worked out for us pretty well over the years. Unintentionally this time, I did the same thing when our kids were born. I am now the main ‘accident’ and throw-up cleaner. But my wife is in charge of all hair related duties.

My wife is not allowed to look at this book.

Ever.

Well, maybe not NEVER ever, but certainly not until after.

After what? After she has to pick and wash and pick and wash all the nits out of our little girl’s hair. See, change its colour from red to blonde and the girl in Nancy Van Laan and George Booth’s, Nit-Pickin’ looks pretty much the same as my own daughter. Curlier than curly hair with easy to tangle ringlets. This would be like a horror book for my wife. She truly dreads that first batch of lice that our kids will inevitably get at some point in their school careers.

I am bringing this book to work and I will bring it home after.

I had a lot of fun reading Nit out loud to my students. The text is written as a poem or a song and its beat made for a good reading experience. The art is kinetic and funny, but I almost missed the best part. All along the top border we see what is happening at nit-level as they are picked out, smeared out, and washed out. This leads to a funny and slightly…troubling final page.

Teachers and parents, you will want to have this one on hand during the inevitable school nit season. It may actually take away some of the fear of lice kids and parents/teachers have.

Available July 1, 2008

By Nancy Van Laan
Illustrated by George Booth
This Edition: Hardcover
Publication Date: July 1, 2008
ISBN-10: 0-689-83898-0
ISBN-13: 978-0-689-83898-9
Ages: 4 - 8
Grades: P - 3

The Clouds Above: A Comic Review....Or Not

Article by Scott Tingley - March 24, 2008

This is not a comic. Comics don’t belong on this site, so that must mean that this book, The Clouds Above is not a comic book. Comic books belong on my other site…This is not a comic book. It has one illustration per page, meaning there are no panels, meaning this is not a comic.

So there.

…..Except, that in the Clouds Above, by Jordan Crane, the words that tell the story are encased by white bubbles that point at the speakers….Wait a minute! Those are word balloons! This is a comic book. There is no text along the bottom or top of the beautifully, Maurice Sendak-like illustrations, only word balloons. Tricked!! This is a comic.

Nonsense!

Blast it!

Bear with me reader(s ??? is there anyone out there?), I’ve had this wonderful little hardcover on my shelf for well over a year, and every month or so I flip through it or maybe read it again, all the while wondering if I am ever going to find a hook that would allow me to write this piece. I knew when I started this kid’s book review site that I was one step closer to being able to do something with this book.

Clouds is an edgy little (its dimensions, not its page count. It is actually 208 pages long) book featuring Simon and his boy-sized pet cat, Jack. Think: Calvin and Hobbes meets Where the Wild Things Are.

On the way to school, Simon and his cat Jack take shortcuts that lead them through the kind of fantastic world that lurks just around the corner from reality and that only children believe exists. From Fantagraphics.com

There is a fairly evil teacher, an odd bunch of classmates, a magic staircase, evil storm clouds, and a scene right out of The Birds. This book is kind of weird and kid-friendly, and dark. Kids like a bit of darkness in their literature. Everyone knows the thing about all of the big Disney movies featuring the loss of a main character’s parent, but even writers like Robert Munsch have a bit of an edge to them, if you look for it (Come on! Dad almost freezes to death in 50 Below Zero, and don’t even get me started on A Promise is a Promise.)

This is a surreal book with images and conversations that will intrigue and engage readers young and old; reluctant or eager. How can you pass up a kid’s book that contains the lines: “Do we still exist?” “I’m starting to wonder.” I want that on a t-shirt!

I just bought a copy for my grade three class, and I will pass on what the reaction to it is.

It has been available in hard cover for a while ($18.95), and it is available now in soft cover ($16.99).

Oh, and it’s a comic.

Author: Jordan Crane, Pages: 208 Dimensions: 6.25" x 6.75" Colors: full-color Publisher Fantagraphics ISBN-10: 1-56097-627-6

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