What Can You Do With the Book…Crouton?

Crouton by Kristine Lombardi! A must read for anyone who loves animals!

I love speaking with authors and hearing the backstory about how they came up with the idea for the book that they wrote. I also love to hear the decisions that authors and illustrators made when they were crafting their book. Hearing their stories often gives me some ideas about how the books can be used to teach literacy skills to kids.

I had the awesome opportunity to speak with Kristine Lombardi, the author and illustrator of the book Crouton — the story of a kitten who is looking for her forever person to adopt. Kristine made the creative decision to write the book from Crouton’s perspective rather than from the little girl’s perspective. In doing this, she used characteristics that are usually used to describe cats, such as finicky and skittish, and instead shows how the little girl can be both of these.

The graduate students who I am working with this year have been teaching the younger students to identify the characteristics of the characters in the books that they are reading. And while kids can often identify the characteristics, it can be more challenging to use the characteristics in their own writing. Speaking with Kristine got me thinking — what if we take characteristics of animals or even people in our lives and apply them to someone else? This allows kids to identify the characteristic and then show the characteristic in their writing. They can be creative, the way Kristine is in Crouton, in how the person shows a particular behavior.

I’m going to give this a try with some of the kids in the next couple of weeks and see how it goes. If you try this, let me know how it works for your kids or students!