Keely's Children's Literature Collection

                                  "Hey Diddle Diddle" is a classic nursery rhyme that was written by Mother Goose. This poem is a short but comical fantasy that very literally makes no sense. All of the characters in this poem have been personified to reflect human action, which makes this poem so comical.   Throughout the poem, several characters are personified to do many things they would not normally do. For example, the cat plays a fiddle and the cow jumped over the moon---both highly impossible feats for animals. Another personification is the little dog when he laughs, though it may sound like an animal is laughing when they make their designated sound, animals do not laugh. One other personification is when the spoon and dish run away, flat and silverware cannot run.      Also, this poem is very close to the rhyming pattern of a limerick which is traditionally a,a,b,a how...

A Bad Case of Stripes by David Shannon is a very colorful and interesting story that is loved by kids across the world. In this story, a young girl becomes extremely worried about what to wear and how others will think of her on the first day of school. It is because of this fear she refuses to eat her favorite food, lima beans, because none of the other children eat or like lima beans. As the young girl continues to deny herself the lima beans, she wakes up one morning with a case of the stripes! With her stripes, the young girl turns into what ever others verbally say she should look like which causes her to be sent home from school and several doctors to come to her house. Nobody could figure out what was wrong with her, until a little old lady came to the house and offered the young girl lima beans. After eating the lima beans, she was cured!     A Bad Case of  Stripes  is a great book for young readers because the book has very simple, everyday language ...

      Too Many Tamales by Gary Soto is a humorous story about a little Hispanic girl who thinks that she has lost her mother's wedding ring while making tamales. After realizing that she has lost the ring, the little girl named Maria, enlisted her cousins in helping her eat all the tamales, 24 to be exact, to find the ring. After eating all of the tamales, Maria and her cousins did not find the ring and while telling her mother that the ring was lost, Maria saw the ring on her mother's hand.     Too Many Tamales is a multicultural tale that helps teach children a few life lessons that greatly benefit them;1) not to play with/take anything that does not belong to them without the owner knowing, and 2)telling the truth and being honest can keep you from doing something unnecessary. This book is great for elementary age children as young as Kindergarten and as old as Second Grade.     This book is a great realistic fiction because ...