Blog #5 (Two Types of Folklore)

Considering I've spent the better part of a week neck-deep in folklore I cannot even begin to explain how much I would really like to blog about a Caldecott book right now. *le sigh* But all whining aside, the two types of folklore I have selected for this post are: folktale and hero tale.

For the folktale I opted to read The Frog Prince retold by Chris Colfer in his companion book to The Land of Stories series titled The Land of Stories: A Treasury of Classic Fairy Tales. In this tale (adapted from The Brothers Grimm) two princess live in castle--one is sweet and kind and the other is mean and selfish. One day the mean and selfish princess drops her golden sphere into a small pond and laments how she will never be able to retrieve it; moments later a frog retrieves the sphere and requests a kiss from the princess as his reward. Disgusted, the princess refuses and tosses the frog against the garden wall. The sweet and kind princess (who had been watching the exchange from her tower) comes down and sweetly kisses the frog, apologizing for the behavior of her sister. And wouldn't you know it, the frog turned into a prince and the two rode off to his kingdom where the two would live happily ever after--unless you read The Frog Prince Continued by Jon Scieszka, that is. 

As with other folktales, the purehearted character (the princess) is rewarded for her actions over the mean and selfish character (her sister). Also present in the story are: royal characters, anthropomorphic creatures, nondescript time and setting (i.e., once upon a time), and magical elements.

For the hero tale I opted to read Beowulf: A Hero's Tale Retold by James Rumford. This succinct retelling of the original epic poem chronicles the hero Beowulf as he slays the ogre Grendal, the ogre's evil mother, and a fierce dragon.

As with other hero tales, the story centers on a hero of human origin who demonstrates the values of courage, friendship, and honor during his journeys. The setting is earthly (taking place in Scandinavia); and mixes real characters and events with stories of dragons and monsters.

While both stories differ in many aspects (characters, location, creatures), one uniting concept is that the hero/ine prevails.  And this, of course, is what ultimately defines folklore as genre: that no matter the odds, the good and righteous will prevail.

Blog #4 (Picture Storybooks)

This week I decided to pull books from the library of one of the 4th grade teachers at my school: The Last Tree by Ingrid Chabbert (author) and Guridi (illustrator), Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty (author) and David Roberts (illustrator), Separate Is Never Equal by Duncan Tonatiuh.

After skimming through each book (looking to see how the text infused with the art and the overall story) the only book that “clicked” for me was The Last Tree by Ingid Chabbert and Guridi. So I returned the two others and went to my local library to select two more titles: It Starts with a Seed by Laura Knowles (author) and Jennie Webber (illustrator) and A Mango in the Hand by Antonio Sacre and Sebastia Serra.

The Last Tree
The Last Tree is an English translation of the original French title Le dernier arbre which tells the story of a young boy and his friend who find what they believe to be “the last tree”.

The story is a beautiful and doleful tale set in a city/landscape where greenery is scarce; where lush fields and trees are merely memories of a time long past. In the tale a pair of boys while out one day discover a sapling—what they believe to be the last tree—and begin to imagine what the tree might look like when it’s a fully-grown tree. The next day the boys become aware that the area in which they found the sapling is due to be demolished, and set about trying to rescue the sapling. At the end of the tale the boys ride far out of the city to plant the tree in an area where it can grow safely and freely. Years later the boys return to find that their sapling has grown into a mighty tree—just as they have.

According to the book notes the artwork was rendered in charcoal, gravure ink, gouche, pencil and digitally. As such, the illustrations in this book are very grey—with little to no color aside from the blue, red, yellow, brown, and green that make up the boys, their bikes, and the sapling/tree. Each page of the book is a double-page spread with full bleed—beautifully creating the doleful tone of the book. The front end pages mimic the grey doleful tone we encounter at the beginning of the story, and the back end pages mimic the more optimistic tone we are left with at the end of the tale by depicting the lush green crown of a tree.

It Starts with a Seed
With its embossed gold title and nature themed illustrations It Starts with a Seed by Laura Knowles is a simple picture storybook about the life cycle of a sycamore tree which reads very much like a Dr. Seuss book. According to the illustrator’s web page, “each illustration in the book is a hand-painted etching print, photographed and painstakingly colour matched”. The color palette used throughout the book has a very “earthy” type feel—with the illustrator utilizing soft and muted browns, greens, oranges, and reds.
Each illustration is bordered and is single paged—until we get to the last two pages which folds out into a four page illustration on one side, and a double-page illustration on the other. The front and back end pages utilize the same theme—a brown backsplash and sketched sycamore seeds floating in the wind.

A Mango in the Hand: A Story Told Through Proverbs
A Mango in the Hand: A Story Told Through Proverbs by Antonio Sacre is a bilingual book with text in Spanish and English about a boy named Francisco who seeks to bring home ripe mangos to his family but ends up giving them out to his various friends and estranged family members along the way.

According to the book notes the illustrations were created using pencil and ink on parchment paper and then digitally colored. Each illustration of the book is double-paged and a full bleed; the color palette is very vibrant and typical of this type of ethnic literature. The end pages for the front and back are styled in the same manner with each featuring a white flower pattern on a greenish-blue pastel background.

All three are wonderful examples of picture storybooks in that each infuses the text with the illustrations to create a whole complete world/story.

Books Mentioned in This Post:
The Last Tree by Ingrid Chabbert and Guridi
Rosie Revere, Engineer by Andrea Beaty and David Roberts
Separate Is Never Equal by Duncan Tonatiuh
It Starts with a Seed by Laura Knowles and Jennie Webber
A Mango in the Hand by Antonio Sacre and Sebastia Serra

Blog #3 (The "Art" of Reading)

Happy Super Bowl Sunday, everyone!

Figuring that the Patriots are going to find a way to win this game no matter how far they’re down (looking at you Tom Brady) I opted to get something productive done and post my third blog post. That said, the book I choose for this assignment was The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus by Jen Bryant (author) and Melissa Sweet (illustrator) a 2015 Caldecott Honor Book.

Initially I was going to blog about Blackout by John Rocco but realizing Mary and I had blogged about the same book for our second blog post (The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend by Dan Santat) I decided to select a different book so that I could present Blackout at next Tuesday’s class and still have another book to present should we be asked to present our blog #3 books.

That said, I came across this book after searching through the Caldecott Award and Honor Books web page and recognized the word thesaurus in the book’s title. After a quick look inside on Amazon I decided to request it from my library and after a few days it arrived.

According to the book notes the illustrations in the book “were created with water color, collage, and mixed media”, and as a result the book has a very Lemony Snicket feel to it. While our textbook describes mixed media as “a combination of media in the same book” (Galda & Cullinan, 2017, p. 77) I am not sure whether the publishers mean the book used water color and collage and mix media or whether the mix media label is because water color and collage were used. Either way, the book is very beautifully done.

When you first open the book you see that the front end pages are decorated in a hodgepodge of different paper types (map, newspaper, graph, journal) and illustrations. This sets up the color palette and stylization that the reader will encounter through the rest of the book. The pages (thanks to the collage aspect of the illustrations) have a mix of full bleed and border to them. Six illustrations require double-page spreads and (due to the collage nature of the book) several images and words end up in the gutter where the pages are bound.  

The illustrations themselves almost exclusively utilize muted colors while their frames (borders) are mix of styles and colors and the background (behind the frame) utilized primarily saturated colors.

Overall, the “illustrations are artistically excellent; relate to the text in a meaningful way; establish mood, setting, characters, and theme; and enhance the emotional impact” (Galda & Cullinan, 2017, p. 69) of the text.

Books Mentioned in The Post:
The Right Word: Roget and His Thesaurus By Jen Bryant and Melissa Sweet
The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend by Dan Santat
Blackout by John Rocco
A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket

References
Galda, L., Liang, L. A., & Cullinan, B. E. (2017). Literature and the child. Boston, MA: Cengage Learning.

Blog #2 (Caldecott Picture Book)

A couple of weeks ago I was at my local Barnes & Noble looking around (as I tend to do), and in the children’s section I came across a book called The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate. The book had a cute—if not sad looking—cover with a black gorilla and a little grey elephant sitting back-to-back. The synopsis on the back read something along the lines of “an easy-going gorilla named Ivan (who lives in a mall) befriends a small elephant named Ruby” and I thought okay, this sounds cute enough. However, since I had already picked up another book Everything You Need to Know to Ace Math in One Big Notebook by Workman Publishing, I placed the book back on the shelf and filed it under the “to read later” section of my brain.

Which brings me to how I ended-up selecting the book I did for this second blog. When I read the assignment I immediately did a search on Amazon for “award winning children’s books” and on the first page of results was The One and Only Ivan. Not wanting to wait two days for prime shipping, I went to my local library to see if they had a copy; sadly, the only copy they had was currently checked-out. So before heading over to Barnes and Noble I stopped in the children’s section and came across a cute looking picture book called The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend By Dan Santat. Remembering that picture books were allowed for this second assignment I checked it out.

The book was about an imaginary friend (whom we later learn is named Beekle) born on “an island far away where imaginary friends were created”. Beekle and the other imaginary friends played together as they waited patiently for a “real child” to imagine them and bring them over to “the real world”. Night after night Beekle stared up at the stars waiting to be imagined by a child. One day, realizing that he might never be imagined, Beekle set out to find his child on his own. After much traveling, Beekle made his way to “the real world” and came across a playground which had children and their imaginary friends playing together. Having “a good feeling about the place”, Beekle searched and searched, wishing and hoping his child would appear. But no one came. Then a voice called out “Hello!” to Beekle and Beekle, sensing something friendly and familiar, came down to greet her. After a little while Alice (as the girl was called) and Beekle (as he was now named) realized “they were perfect together” and the two of them “had many new adventures”.

My favorite part about his book is the illustrations; each page is beautifully designed, and the colors are just rich and beautiful. The premise of the story itself I was not so fond of (in that I use to watch a cartoon show called Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends on Cartoon Network and the book’s explanation of how imaginary friends are created is counter to how I believe imaginary friends are created. Which is to say, imaginary friends are born once they are conceived and drawn by children. Not vice versa), but that aside, I was also unhappy with the ending in that it is very vague. Closing on “and together they did the unimaginable” while riding away on a boat from the real world with other children’s imaginary creatures toward the imaginary world (that is how I interpreted the last illustration) leaves me wondering whether a “real child” could see/interact with other imaginary friends, and whether a “real child” could make it back to the island of imaginary friends. And if so, what would happen? What would be the consequences/repercussions?

While the book was cute (as I assumed it would be from the cover), the only reason I would add The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend to my personal classroom library would be for the beautiful illustrations--they really are that beautiful.

Books Mentioned in The Post:
The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate
Everything You Need to Know About Math in One Big Fat Notebook by Workman Publishing
The Adventures of Beekle: The Unimaginary Friend by Dan Santat