My Friend Is Sad

Willems, M. (2007). My Friend Is Sad. Mo Willems. New York, New York: Hyperion Books for Children.

Annotation: This is a book about a little elephant named Gerald and he is very sad. His little piggy friend tries to cheer him up, but in the end the only thing that Gerald needed was his friend to cheer him up.

Genre: Humor

Grade Level: Pre-K thru 2nd

Readers who would like this: This is a cute book for a teacher to have in their classroom library and also a book for teachers to create a project from.

Response/Rating: I give this book a 3, I felt like the idea and moral of the story was cute, but I love a lot of graphics and color, so the illustrations were a little plain for me.

Reading strategy: I would choose the storyboard reading strategy. The way that the author uses vocab bubbles for the script is really neat and fun. This strategy allows students to find the main ideas within a story. The students draw a picture and give a caption below explaining what is happening in the picture. I think this strategy would be appropriate, because students can re-create what they saw and heard and make it their own. They can use the same format as the author and create a story about their friend and how they would have made their friend happy if they were sad by correlating it with the main ideas of the story. The students can also share theirs among their classmates to see how they differ.