Skip to main content

The Dark


  Summary of book: The Dark was written by Robert Munsch and illustrated by Sami Suomalainen. The story follows a little girl that lets a small dark thing out of her cookie jar one morning. Jule  Ann names it "the Dark." The Dark thing starts to eat shadows and the more shadows it eats, the bigger it gets and the shadows disappear. Eventually the shadow gets so big that it is bigger than Jule Anns house. Finally, she finds the shadow of a chair and breaks off pieces to lure the Dark into the same cookie jar that it had come out of. The Dark gets into the jar and Jule Ann ties up and tapes the jar shut and with her friends she throw's it away. At the end of the story, all the shadows took a full week to come back. 

Why you would/would not use this book in your classroom? I would use this book in a kindergarten classroom to discuss being brave and also, if I worked in a private Christian school it could be a good tie into the idea that as Christians, we have the light of Jesus Christ that always overpowers the dark. 

Appropriate age group for this book: 4-8

Ideas for unit of study to include this book or how you might use this book in the classroom: I was researching ideas that could be used for this book and found an entire unit around Robert Munsch books. And from there they use the books, including The Dark, for teaching and learning skills such as text connections, cause and effect, story elements, vocab, etc. I think that I would use this book in a unit including several of Robert Munsch's books. 



Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Beautiful Blackbird

    Summary of Book: Beautiful Blackbird was written and illustrated by Ashley Bryan. This story starts with in Africa and describes that all the birds were multicolored and non at all had any colors of black. One day all the birds gathered at the lake per Ringdoves request, including blackbird. Ringdove asked who the prettiest bird was and they all responded blackbird. Ringdove asks blackbird to color him black, however blackbird said that it doesn't matter what he looks like on the outside, but what's on the inside. However, he still agrees to color him the next day in black. When he does, all the other birds want to be colored black and blackbird agrees and colors them all black the next day. He paints them all and the birds surround him and sing that black is beautiful.  Why you would/would not use this book in your classroom? I would not use this book in my classroom because the general theme of the story kind of threw me off and I was not a huge fan of it. It just s...
Post a Comment
Read more

Words On Fire

    Summary of Book: Words On Fire was written by Jennifer Nielsen and is the recipient of the Bluebonnet Award. In this story we follow 12-year old Audra who lives in recently occupied Lithuania in 1893. Lithuania has been occupied by the Russians that want to cut out all aspects of Lithuania life style and replace it with Russian ways only. This includes the destruction of all books and history of Lithuania. Audra's parents are apart of the resistance and are book smugglers. When they get arrested, Audra goes and lives with an old lady named Milda who also works underground. Audra decides that she is going to pick up the torch that her parents left in order to preserve her countries history and also to try and save her parents. In the end, we see Audra reunited with her parents and the book ban has been lifted from Lithuania.   Why you would/would not use this book in your classroom? I would use this book in my classroom because this story has a very interesting ma...
Post a Comment
Read more

Balloons Over Broadway

   Summary of Book: Balloons over Broadway was written and illustrated by Melissa Sweet. The story starts with talking about Tony Sarg and that he became a Marionette man when he was only 6 years old. When he grew uo he moved to London to continue to create his marionettes and eventually moved to New York where his popularity continued to grow. Macy's asked Sarg to create a "puppet parade" for his holiday window. And his mechanical marionettes danced and thrilled the little children who passed. Macy's decided to create a parade for immigrants that would include a street carnival from all over the world. As the parade went on, it grew more and more until it had grown to much and the real animals scared the children to much. So Macy's requested Tony to change the animals. So he decided to make much larger marionettes that could be held up in the sky. However, to make sure they were not to heavy, he made them balloons and filled them with helium. He made sure they we...
Post a Comment
Read more