Yesterday was the first session of my four week Book Bunch class at the local elementary school. (Since I taught Citizen Science to the older grades, which includes my two sons, fairplay dictated I come up with something for my daughter and the younger grades.)
Our Book Bunch concept is pretty simple: we get together once a week for a month and read books out loud. To make things interesting, my assistant (Hooray for Mrs. Wattu!) and I came up with a silly theme. To make things interesting AND fun, we didn’t tell the kids what the theme was; instead we gave them a chance to guess the theme after each book.
We started with BAGHEAD, written and illustrated by Jarrett J. Krosoczka. The kids loved this story of Josh and his bad hair day, and they guessed our theme was probably hair.
The second book was A BOY AND HIS BUNNY, written by Sean Bryan and illustrated by Tom Murphy. The boy in the story has got a bunny on his head, and our students are pretty sharp … at least one of them guessed things on a person’s head. The majority, however, were still voting for hair. (I didn’t understand their insistence at first, but I now think my clever book bunch-ers recognized the word hare as a synonym for bunny and a homonym for the word hair. I am dealing with brilliant children here and will clearly need help with subsequent themes; more on this below.)
The final book, SHE’S WEARING A DEAD BIRD ON HER HEAD!, written by Kathryn Lasky and illustrated by David Catrow, sealed the deal. The kids were (mostly) patient for this story of how the Massachusetts Audubon Society was founded; the moment it was finished they screamed our theme: silly things on a head.
We didn’t have time for the other books I had brought, but I’ll include them here for the theme picture book readers out there: THERE IS A BIRD ON YOUR HEAD! Written and illustrated by Mo Willems and ROCKS IN HIS HEAD, written by Carol Otis Hurst and illustrated by James Stevenson.
Okay, dear readers … next week’s theme needs to be more cleverly disguised. Put on your (silly) thinking caps and send me your thoughts and ideas. Please?!