The Little Island

Picture Book
Title: The Little Island
Author: Margaret Wise Brown
Illustrator: Leonard Weisgard
Age Level: 5-8
Rating: 3 out of 5

Summary
The Little Island is about life on a secluded island.  The book describes the activity that happens on the island and the changes that come with different seasons and night and day.  A little kitten comes to the island and is very intrigued by the fact that the island considers itself part of the rest of the land that makes up the world.

Opinion
I chose to read this picture book because it won the Caldecott Medal and I was searching for a book about the ocean for my child study student.  I thought that this book had very appealing illustrations which look to be done with watercolors or paint. The illustrations are very bold and draw your eye in which allows you to really paint a mental image of what is going on in the book.  The book is set up with the text on the left page and the images on the right page which allows for consistency in reading which is something that I think is important for early readers.  On some of the pages with text, there are also black and white pictures in the bottom corner which add a unique element to the illustrations.  I did think that some of the dialogue in this book was a bit confusing.  I didn't like how the author worded some of her sentences because they were really choppy and didnt flow which made understanding what was happening more difficult and this may be a problem for younger students.

Although this is a Caldecott winning book I do not think I would use it in my classroom as a future teacher.  I did not find this reading to be very meaningful and I don't think that I could draw future discussion from the content in this book.  I read this book with my child study student and she found it a bit difficult to understand.  When I asked her to summarize what she thought the book was about she was not able to do this accurately.