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Tuesday, October 4, 2011

The Napping House ~ By Audrey Wood, Illustrated by Don Wood (1984, Harcourt Brace)


Summary: This story is about nap time. It takes place in a house and the weather was made for napping. There is a "pile" of people and creatures stacked on top of a little bed. Everyone is sleeping peacefully until...a little flea does a little something that cause everyone to wake up! The story resolves nicely as everyone is awake and the sun is shinning.

My Review: I love reading this book to children. I think that once you start reading, you know something big is going to happen... The illustrations are wonderful and add to the story when needed. I like to sequence this story with students and I also like to look at the size of the characters in comparison to when they appear in the story. The size of the characters compared to one another also helps the students sequence the story. The fly cannot come before the dog because we wouldn't be able to see it. Overall this is a great story to read to young children that are just learning about literature.
Author, Illustrator and ImageAudrey was born and raised in Florida and moved to Mexico with her parents where they studied art. Her father, grandfather and great-grandfather were all artists. She was also an artist, making four consecutive generations of artists.
Don was born and raised in California where he was a potato farmer and was in charge of a portion of his family farm. He told his family he wanted to be an artist and went to the University of California at Santa Barbara. This is where he met Audrey.The were married and had named Bruce. Since then they have collaborated on several different books including: Piggies, Merry Christmas, Big Hungry Bear! The Big Hungry Bear, Elbert's Bad Words, King Bidgood's in the Bathtub, Heckedy Peg, Tickle Otcopus, Quick As A Cricket, Bright and Early Thursday Evening and Moonflute.
Genre: Fiction
Theme/Skill: Sequencing, Retelling, Size Ordering
Age Level: Birth - 1st Grade
Pre-reading Activity: Ask students/children what they think the book will be about. Ask students to make predictions about what will happen next on each page.
Post-reading Activity: Have students/children sequence the order of events. Have student retell the story. Ask students what would happen is people and animals were in a different size order.

2 comments:

  1. I like the idea of having them predict what would happen if they were in different size order; it helps them put things into perspective!

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  2. It was great when we used this book because we had a felt board set of characters that we used to sequence the book. Each of the characters was proportioned to each other so the students could see that they were "out of order".

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