The Best Laid Plans of Aardvarks and Mice...

I've already said that everyday after lunch, we read aloud. This year I've been trying a new way to organize my read-aloud choices. I decided that every month we would choose books with a different animal focus. One colleague suggested that I begin the year using the Arthur books (author Marc Krensky) because the original Arthur was 25 years old (at least) and Arthur's Nose, the first of the series, had been re-issued in a birthday edition and there was a lot of hype this year around its re-issue. I could find several lessons to talk about how the author/illustrator had changed his vision of his character; we could research aardvarks, which start with the letter "a" -- a good way to begin the school year. I thought this was a really good idea, but -- alas, when I went to the library, the book had already been checked out, it would take time to order a new one, and I needed a book to read - stat! So I defaulted to another beginning of the year book, Kevin Henkes' Lily's Purple Plastic Purse. I love this book for several reasons: its main character, Lily, a lovely little girl mouse, adores her teacher -- she wants to be a teacher, she practices her teaching skills on her baby brother Julius, until one day, the teacher lays the law down, telling an impatient Lily she will have to wait to show off her new purple plastic purse to her classmates at a classroom sharing session. Lily, an impetuous, passionate and willful young lady, rebels by drawing a caricature of her teacher with accompanying negative labels which he discovers. Being a thoughtful and sensitive model for all educators, the teacher handles Lily's bad behavior in a productive way, gives her a chance to do the right thing and resumes his position as one of her favorite people in the world.

There are many Kevin Henkes' books where the main characters are rendered as mice: Chrysanthemum, Julius, Baby of the World, Wemberly Worried, and Owen to name a few. There are probably more, but these are a few that we read as part of read aloud this September. I really like Henkes' main characters -- they're original, spirited, and act a lot like six year olds. They get mad, have tantrums, regret their bad behavior, and usually learn a behavioral lesson and apologize in the course of the book. Henkes might have chosen a different animal to become his characters, but he chose mice. So, you guessed it, rather than using aardvarks to launch our read alouds, we began the year with a study of mice. In addition to reading the above Henkes' mice picture books, we read a lot of Leo Lionni: Alexander and the Wind-up Mouse, Matthew's Dream, Let's Play, Frederick, and The Greentail Mouse.

We also read two versions of the city mouse and the country mouse. One of my favorite moments in the month was, while reading Jan Brett's beautifully illustrated Town Mouse, Country Mouse, we came to the part where the male country mouse falls from a kitchen precipice into the paws of the slumbering house cat. At least one of my students had to turn away from the book, and shrieked, "I can't look!!!" This moment underscored for me the incredible power of reading to children at this age -- this little boy visualized a terrifying fate for the tiny husband and wife mice characters and he just couldn't face the prospect of what would happen if he looked at the book. He was very relieved and calmed down when he heard that, in this version, the two mice escape to return to their comfortable (at least to them) tree home in the country.

We made a list of facts we knew about mice, and lest you think first graders don't know anything about mice -- here's what we knew: mice have four legs, two eyes, two ears, a nose with nostrils, whiskers, gray, black or brown fur, and a long tail. Mice have tiny teeth, and they can bite you. Mice are not pets. Mice like to eat cheese, and run around the house. Mice live in holes, outside or in the house. Mice poop everywhere. Mice run fast.

In the course of the month I read snippets from books about mice and we uncovered more interesting facts: mice have 4-9 babies in a litter and an average of 17 litters in a year (!!!); baby mice are called kittens (we thought that was really interesting). A mouse's only real defense (according to one source) is its ability to run fast in a zigzag motion to escape a predator. We learned lots of animals like to eat mice -- almost all big birds, bats, owls, eagles, cats, tigers, and other big cats. Mice have amazingly sensitive hearing and can smell very well, but, on the other hand, mice can barely see. One non-fiction source said that some researchers think mice can only see one-two inches in front of them, which might account for why these little critters can wander into the clutches of my two orange tabbies and not blink an eye.

And so this September our 1st graders became mouse experts. Last week after three weeks of reading books with mouse characters and talking about mice anatomy and behavior, we went to the computer lab and drew pictures of mice, then opened a text box and wrote mouse facts on our drawings. It brought a very satisfying end to our discussions and when the students heard our drawings were going to be posted in the library with some of the books we had read -- well, we went wild! It was a very exciting culmination to the month.

Who needs aardvarks? Next month ... alligators!