My brief notes on the books I happened to receive in class today. Reflect on the books you read, and share some of your insight related to what makes for a high quality story. Share them via a comment to this post...

Punk Farm: The author will ask or otherwise pose question that—while rhetorical in an adult’s mind—sets the stage for both imagination and prediction. What will the animals be doing in the barn? We know that they will be rehearsing for their upcoming concert. But the question helps children make their own predictions, test them for accuracy, and use their imagination in creative ways.

No more Homework! No More Tests! Poems: Some of these create a hyper-reality, takes a common object or thing—a desk, someone’s nostril, a lunch—and either examines it closely or describes it using extreme examples, usually sensory in nature.

Rainbow Fish and the Big Blue Whale: Take a visual element that repeats throughout, relate it to character, and make that static image take on dynamic meaning. So the author subverts that static visual by imbuing it with dynamic meaning.

If You Give a Moose a Muffin: Take an animal and provide it with a human trait. I’ve seen this with inanimate objects too, for example, a book about a sad pea who doesn’t want to eat his candy dinner that his parents shove down his throat. In this instance, it’s about transgression, an animal of inordinate size and the outrageous transgression that causes a chain of events—the entire thing is about consequences, how one action leads to another, and in turn to another.

John Pig’s Halloween: Rhyme with purpose, rhyme that emphasizes a way of coping with an emotion. One thing that the author does is uses the meter and rhyme scheme to emphasize the main character’s way of resolving a conflict or coping with an otherwise uncontrollable emotion, like anger or fear.