Grimes, Nikki. A Pocketful of Poems

This book is a collection of short poems. These poems are all inspired by one single word and typically discuss how it makes the author

 feel.  For instance, there is a poem written on the word "homer." The poem discusses the time of year when children play baseball or softball. The poem describes the way the author feels about this season and how she looks forward to hitting one last homer.

Strategy Connection: This book, like many other poetry books, can be used to work on visualization, because of the many descriptive words found in poems. Children can not only visualize how the poem makes them feel, what is happening in them, or use them as a template to write their own descriptive poems.  This story contains fun pictures or backgrounds that go to each poem. The children can use these to create their own idea of what is happening as well.

Day, Alexandra. Good Dog Carl

This story is a picture book, about a baby who is left with a Labrador Retriever while his parents go out. The book visually tells the story of all the events that go on while the dog is in charge and how the dog takes are of all the problems that arise while the parents are away.

Strategy Connection: This story is really good for helping children learn to visualize. In the case of Good Dog Carl, there are no words, so the children have to focus on pictures in order to follow what is happening in this story. The pages tend to skip scenes at times, and this helps children learn  to create a video in their minds of what is happening in between pages. Teachers could do activities with children on drawing a picture that would fit in between two pages in the book. The children could also design a picture and talk about what is happening in their picture to give the teacher an idea of what they understand is happening in the story.

Miller, Sara S.  Three Stories You Can Read to Your Cat

This is a book that contains three short stories about why it is that

cats sleep so much. For any young girl or boy who adore their cats, this

book is perfect. It is full of adventures and explanations of what is going

through a cat's mind during the day.

Strategy Connection: Because this book is packed with adventure,

children can mentally make their own movie in their minds about what is

happening to these cats, or what it would be like if their cat were in the story.

Children acan make connections by reading this story and thinking of times

where their cat has acted the same way. This helps kids be creative about what

is going on inside cats' minds, because we will never really know what they are

thinking.