A Tiger Called Tomas

Summary of Book: A Tiger Called Tomas was written by Charlotte Zolotow and illustrated by Marta Alvarez Miguens. The book starts with Tomas sitting on his front stoop in his new neighborhood and his mom keeps pushing him to go and talk to his neighbors and the little children, but Tomas keeps questioning and asking but what if they don't like me, to which his mom says "why wouldn't they like you?" However, he never goes up to them and continues to sit on his stoop. At Halloween, Tomas's mom gets him a tiger costume with a mask that covers his face. He has the confidence to go out and get candy from his neighbors since he thinks they won't recognize them. However, as he goes from house to house, his neighbors all recognize him and the lady with the cat asks him to come back and visit the cat because she gets lonely. And then Gerald, the tall boy asks him to come play as well. And one by one neighbors recognize him and ask him to come back or to play with them. When Tomas goes home he looks in the mirror and is shocked they all new who he was. His mom said that they all liked him and Tomas feels amazing and realizes that he liked them as well.

Why you would/would not use this book in your classroom? I really enjoyed this book and the story of it. I thought it was cute and well written and the illustrations were really good. The only reason I would not use this book in my classroom is because I do not celebrate Halloween. It goes against my faith and so I'm not sure that I could read a story about it.

Appropriate age group for this book: 3-6

Ideas for unit of study to include this book or how you might use this book in the classroom: A cute activity of incorporating this book would be to read it and then have my students create their own masks that cover their faces and then have everybody in the classroom try and recognize who everybody is.

Comments

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...

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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...

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...

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