Tuesday

Title: Tuesday
Author: David Wiesner
Publisher: Clarion Books
Date of Publication: 1991
Illustrator: David Wiesner
Genre: Children’s Picture Book

Readability Lexile: K-2 (ages 4-8)

Summary:
Tuesday is a book that revolves around the idea of what happens after we go to bed at night.  It all starts with the simplistic sentence of, “Tuesday evening, around eight.”  From then on there are no more words within the story until the very end, only pictures.  We as the reader see frogs on lily pads flying around town, with big frog smiles on their faces.  The readers follows the frogs as they continue move through town flying by a man eating a late night snack, a grandma sleeping in front of her television, getting chased by a dog, and then returning the favor by chasing the dog, and then before we know it the sun is starting to shine again.  The frogs begin to hop off their lily pads and back into their ponds just in time for the town to wake back up.  As the reader we see the town all a fluster trying to figure out just what happened last night with cops, detectives, and reporters looking at all the wet lily pads everywhere.  Then we are at the end and we read the only other words in our story which reveal that we are now a week later around eight. 

Evaluation:
I thought that this was a great story for many reasons.  This story allowed the reader to use the picture clues to follow the story whether they knew what the two sentences said or not.  I also loved how the author/illustrator allowed for the reader to interpret the story in many different ways by not having words on every page.  The illustrations within the story allowed for each reader to interpret the story with the same big understanding but allowed for readers to have their own twists, and thoughts and to me that is sometimes the most amazing part of literacy.  The plot is something that we think is so unreal that it makes it almost magical, and that in itself makes it part of the reason why this story is so great for this age group.  This story may not be the strongest book to use when working on character identification, or setting, but I feel it would be a good story to use when working on beginning, middle, and end.  The story allowed me as the reader to feel as though I was flying on my own lily pad with the frogs on that Tuesday night, because the illustrations were so well done. 

Illustrations:
As previously mentioned, the illustrations within this story are a major component of reading and understanding the story.  The illustrations allow the reader to follow the frogs along their journey while using their own imaginations to make their own inferences about what and why the frogs are doing what their doing.  The illustrations are the kind were it allows the reader to make a thoughtful inquiry the first time, but allows for them to come back and look a little closer and see that they may have just missed some smaller details that could play into the story that they are building within their mind.  The illustrations are really the backbone of this story, however they don’t tie the reader down to processing the story in one specific manner. 

Mini Lesson:
After reading this story, I immediately thought of doing a mini lesson involving creating our own book and then from there putting on a stage show or a play of our book.  Each student would get to create their own story about what they would do after everyone else was asleep.  We would then illustrate our book, either using water colors just like David Wiesner or many different art supplies to allow for more creative processing.  Unlike our Tuesday book we would write out as much of our story as possible, so that we can continue to work on sounding out our words, letter writing, etc. Finally, once our books are done we would have the choice to read our story to the class or act the story out to the class on our class stage.