Richard Shaw (3)

Simple little book, very appealing. It's a collection of short stories, poems and fables about birds, illustrated with drawings and paintings in varied styles. The authors include William Blake, Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Kenneth Grahame, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Louis Stevenson, Aesop and many others. Robins are featured prominently- I suppose because they're popular and familiar. My favorite was the old English folktale about the magpie showing the other birds how to build nests- she went through a complicated series of steps but the others did not wait to see the whole process, each leaving when they saw something they liked or recognized, and thus they all made different kind of nests.

from the Dogear Diary… (mer)

SUMMARY
Jenny finds a kitten in a pumpkin patch and asks her mother if she can keep it. Her mother tells her to return the kitten to the pumpkin patch. However, Jenny is determined to find a home for the kitten. As she makes her way to the patch, she stops by each neighbors' house and asks if they would like to keep the kitten, but they all say no. As she tries to find a home for the cat, it keeps getting heavier and heavier. Once she was at the pumpkin patch, she discovered that the cat belonged to a witch.

REVIEW
I don't think I would use this book to introduce Halloween to my students. I might include it as a book option for silent reading, but I feel like there are stronger books that I could include in my classroom. The story didn't really have connection to Halloween other than Jenny's mother telling her that they could work on her costume after she returned the cat and the witch at the end of the story. It was a cute book, but it did not have the information or themes that I was hoping it would have.… (mer)