A House for Hermit Crab

Title: A House for Hermit Crab
Author: Eric Carle
Publisher: Simon & Schuster for Young Readers
Date of Publication: 1987
Illustrator: Eric Carle
Genre Designation: Children’s Fiction
Readability Lexile: K-2 (ages 5-8)

Summary:
Hermit Crab has outgrown his shell and much to his dismay he has to find a new one.  He looks around and finds a shell that he will fit into, but it is just so plain!  Hermit Crab decides that the shell will do but it needs something to make it feel more like home.  Hermit Crab begins to find some friends that will join his shell that will make it much less plain, and boring.  Just when Hermit Crab finished his long journey and had decided that his house was perfect, it began to feel a bit small.  Hermit Crab realized that even though he had come to love all of his friends and his new shell, that he must go and find a bigger one.  It was hard for Hermit until one day when he saw a smaller hermit crab wondering by that didn’t have a shell because she had outgrown her shell.  Hermit Crab told her that he had outgrown his shell too, he asked her to promise to be good to his friends and that she could have his shell.  This time when Hermit Crab ventured out to find a new shell it wasn’t as scary as he remembered.  Hermit Crab found a big shell, that looked pretty plain...and then thought of all the possibilities!

Evaluation:
I really liked this story, I thought that it had so many different positive qualities that the reader could take from it.  The author used personification to tell the story about change.  Of course a crab can’t talk, or ask all of the other stuff in the ocean to come and be a part of his shell, but it does provide a setting for readers to relate the story back to their own lives.  Eric Carle did a really nice job of showing how our main character grew as the story went on.  The reader saw just how nervous the crab was to leave his shell the first time, but by the second time he was excited about the possibilities that were in front of him.  I also enjoyed how the author used foreshadowing by telling the reader that Hermit Crab was beginning to outgrow his new shell, but we didn’t actually see him move out his shell until the next page.  This would allow the reader to process the text and even make a prediction about what might happen.  Eric Carle also did a nice job of using allegory with this story, as we often see with many of his stories.  Like we already mentioned the story can be seen as a story about accepting change, but it could also be looked as a story about diversity and understanding that it is okay to be different.  I think that it also could be about survival, what did the hermit crab do to survive, he could have chose not to find a new shell and what would have happened. 

Illustrations:
Like always the illustrations by Eric Carle are some of my favorites.  He does a great job with this story of making the reader feel like you moving along with the hermit crab.  The illustrations really add to the text, by supporting it as pictures clues and not distracting from the text.

Mini-Lesson:
This mini-lesson would focus on allegory.  Students would have a piece of paper and draw the same picture on both sides, but tell a different story for each side of the paper.  This would be one of our first steps in understanding how one thing can mean or represent two separate things.