The Polar Express

Fantasy: Caldecott Medalist

Allsburg, C. (1985). The Polar Express. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing.

The Polar Express is a magical story of the power of believing in something such as Santa Claus.  The story follows a small boy who boards a magical train to the North Pole on Christmas Eve. When he gets to the North Pole he realizes that he is apart of the "First Gift of Christmas" Celebration.  The little boy was actually chosen to be the lucky one who received the first gift! While he knew he could ask for  anything in the world, he chose to ask for something really special.

While The Polar Express may seem like a book for younger elementary students, there are several lessons you could do that would be appreciated by older elementary students as well.  In the writing of this book, the author uses a lot of comparisons to help illustrate his story.  As upper elementary students are learning about similes and metaphors, this book could be used as an example.  An example would be to make a chart comparing the similes and metaphors to the plain language.

"We drank hot cocoa as thick and rich as melted chocolate bars" :

 The hot chocolate was sweet and good

"Faster and faster we ran along, rolling over peaks and through valleys like a car on a roller coaster" :

 The train went fast over hills

After comparing the two different types of "languages", students can practice writing their own similes and metaphors about their own lives.

Cinderella, Cendrillon, and Pear Blossom

Folk Literature/ Multicultural and International Literature/ Caldecott Medalist

San Souci, R. (2002). Cendrillon: A caribbean cinderella. New York, NY: Aladdin Paperbacks.

Climo, S. The korean cinderella. Harper Collins Publishers.

Brown, M. (1997). Cinderella . Aladdin Paperbacks.

The story of "Cinderella" is a very popular one.  Almost every culture has their own version of the magical fairy tale.  I pulled three different versions of the famous Cinderella story, first Caldecott Medalist, Cinderella translated by Marcia Brown, Cendrillon; A Caribbean Cinderella by Robert D. San Souci, and The Korean Cinderella by Shirley Climo.  All of these books follow the general story of the classic Cinderella Story with their own different international spins.

With the famous story of "Cinderella", it seems that almost every culture has it's own version of the classic tale.  Using either these three versions, or pulling more versions of the fairy tale, students could explore the similarities and differences between different countries and cultures.  Using the Wordle App, I created three Word Clouds.  I copied and pasted the whole story into the Wordle App, and it generates a Word Cloud.  Each time a word is repeated throughout the story, the word is represented in a larger font on the Word Cloud.  This is a really cool tool to use to show the commonalities between the stories.  For instance, the Cinderella Word Cloud and The Pear Blossom Word Cloud both contain large words for Prince/Magistrate, signifying that the idea of a prince with the Cinderella is a commonality between the two stories.  I think the more stories you would be able to generate a Word Cloud for, the more interesting it would be to connect the similarities and differences between the actual written stories.