Blog #9

Interrupting Chicken

Written and illustrated by: David Ezra Stein

Candlewick Press, 2010

38 pages

Fantasy

I chose this book because I was in the library trying to find the book Leaves by David Ezra Stein and this book was next to the book and the illustrations on the front caught my eye.  This story is about a father and his young daughter reading a story right before bedtime.  But it’s not what you think.  The father is a rooster and the little girl is a chicken.  As the father starts to settle his daughter down to read a story, the little girl keeps interrupting him as the reads her stories.  This frustrates the father because he wants her to fall asleep, but she just wants to stay awake.  After attempting many stories, the father finally gives in and lets his daughter read him a bedtime story.  In the end, the father falls asleep listening to his daughter read.

The illustrations were created by the author, David Ezra Stein.  The medium used are watercolors, water-soluble crayon, china marker, pen, opaque white ink, and tea.  The text is typed in Malonia Voigo.  The drawings use very bold colors and cover the entire page.  The illustrator used vivid shades of red, green, blue, and brown.  I love the illustration on pages eight and nine.  The book the father is reading is drawn, but it shows how his daughter interrupted by putting the chicken bursting onto the page in caption bubbles.  It is the perfect representation of how blurting totally takes away from a book or conversation.  It is so rude!

This book is appropriate for any age.  The language of the book is better for independent readers in second through fourth grades.  Blurting and interrupting cause havoc inside any classroom.  This would be great for bringing this subject up to an elementary school class.  That falls under a lesson on respect through character education.  I like this book because of the creative illustrations and the theme of the story.  This book is short enough to read to a class in less than five minutes.  It would be great to read right after lunch or between lessons during a transition.  This book has won no awards.