Journal Entry #19

 

 

Chicken Chickens

Written and Illustrated by Valeri Gorbachev

North-South Books, 2001

32 pages

Fantasy

 

            I chose Chicken Chickens, because it has a catchy title and is a cute, simple book to read for early elementary grades. This book is about two baby chicks that go to the park for the first time with Mother Hen. All of the other animals offer to let them swing, slide, and see-saw, but they are scared to try anything. The chicks think they are too little, but they wanted to try to slide. When they got to the top of the slide, they got scared, and would not try it. Then beaver offered to let them slide with him the first time, so they slide down the slide on his tail. After that, the chicks were not scared anymore and could slide by themselves.

            The illustrations in Chicken Chickens are done by drawing and painting. It looks like they are sketched in pen and the color is filled in with watercolor paints. The colors are soft, not too bright, but very colorful. The lines create a lot of texture, especially on the characters. The pen marks make the chicks look fuzzy, and the mice, the dog, and the cat look furry. There is a lot of detail in the feathers on Mother Hen too. The illustrations are very cute and playful, reflecting the nature of the book.

            Chicken Chickens would be great for a beginning reader in first grade, and would be a nice addition to a classroom library for independent reading. It would be a great read aloud for early elementary grades like kindergarten. It would be useful to talk to students about how everyone is scared to try something, at least once in their life, and this could be a prompt for a journal entry. This is a good book to talk about helping others, and friendship, for character education. The genre of Animal Fantasy could be taught, and the students could discuss how animals cannot do those things in real life. This book has no awards or honors.