I haven't blogged much since school started. I've got a new assignment and between moving into a new classroom and pulling together materials for math intervention and ELA support for our Spanish Immersion students, I've been...busy.
But when I pulled out my Halloween books and saw this, I knew I had to share. Whenever I read this to children, I always ask if they have read Goodnight, Moon or Runaway Bunny. Most of the time, the answer is yes and we talk about what they like about those stories before I tell them that this book is written by the same author. That always gets them ready to hear something wonderful. The Fierce Yellow Pumpkin follows a tiny, green pumpkin as he grows into a big, orange pumpkin in a field he shares with a one-eyed scarecrow whose ferociousness he wishes to emulate.
As the field mice scamper around him in the big field, the little pumpkin watches the scarecrow chase away the blackbirds and he vows that someday he will scare the field mice away. His wish comes true when a trio of children choose him to be their jack-o-lantern, carve him up, set him out on the porch, light a candle inside him, and...the mice run away.
Margaret Wise Brown turns a typical tale about a pumpkin becoming a jack-o-lantern into an absorbing adventure filled with both rich and childlike language - zigzag, gallop, dreadful, ferocious, inky black, droopy.
Caldecot medalist Richard Egielski uses warm colors and shadows to evoke the mood of Brown's writing. The light on the children's faces as they gaze at their jack-o-lantern took me back to the years of carving pumpkins in our home.
Smithsonian Magazine article about Margaret Wise Brown
Richard Egielski website
Other Halloween books:
Halloween Rhythm and Rhyme (8 books in 1 post)
National Geographic Kids: Halloween
Halloween Night: Twenty-One Spooktacular Poems
The Little Old Lady Who Was Not Afraid of Anything
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
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