Love This Book

I'm always curious how a book that I love will work with a young audience. So after I read Elisha Cooper's lovely Big Cat, Little Cat, I tossed it in my book bag and took it along on a day when I was reading to a preschool class and a first grade class. And I read them some fun, never-fail titles and then, in each class, I pulled out Big Cat, Little Cat. And, in both classes, though we had just been jumping and rhyming and shouting refrains, things got very quiet. But quiet in that good way, where a kid is connecting with a book and its voice and mood and art and they understand it. It's working for them.

It reminded me of how really good books bring their own world into a room and how there is something about that world that makes a child want to be in that world. Thank you, Mr. Cooper for a really good book. It will stay in the bag.