Review Detail

There is a lot of great information in this book that would have been really helpful to me in 1971, when Miss Gordon had up create stories. Of course, back in the day, we created covers by wrapping cereal box cardboard in wallpaper samples, so my book was resplendent in turquoise flocked paper! I am absolutely convinced that encouraging very young children to tell stories is helpful to their later abilities to write, and creating actual books is very motivating. This is helpful even for older students, who seem to have a lot of trouble following the stream of consciousness technique that Bert uses to come up with his dinosaur pizza or pigeon airways stories!

I enjoyed that this was also a story about writing a book, and think this is especially appealing to the younger children. I would almost like to see this reworked for older students with more of a clean cut, list format. The ideas are excellent, but older readers might not be as interested in Bert.

This reminded me a little of Kramer's Tell Me a Lion Story, another clever way to get children to think about story telling, and is a great book to add to books like Hanlon's Ralph Tells a Story, Barnett and Rex's How This Book Was Made and Pett's This is My Book. If your young writers want to know more about how professionally published books are put together, I have fond memories of Aliki's How a Book is Made (1988), especially the fact that she had the illustrator make her look older in the illustration so that if she talked about the book years after it came out, children wouldn't ask why she didn't look like the picture! Dolan won't have that problem unless she transmogrifies into a worm!