Where Are You Going? To See My Friend! A story of friendship in two languages

Title: Where Are You Going? To See My Friend!  A story of friendship in two languages
Author: Eric Carle & Kazuo Iwamura
Publisher: Orchard Books
Date of Publication: 2001
Illustrator: Eric Carle & Kazuo Iwamura
Genre Designation: Children’s Fiction
Readability Lexile: K-2 (ages 5-8)

Summary:
This story is about an animal who is on an adventure to go see their friend, but along the way they pick up even more friends.  At the end of the story we find out that all of the animals were going to find their human friend.  Once all the animals are with the boy we meet the boys friend who is a young Japanese girl.  This were the story picks up in Japanese.  The reader can then turn the book over and start the story again by following the illustrations and the words that are written in Japanese.  In the middle of the story there is fold out where Eric Carle’s illustrations meet with Kazuo Iwamura’s illustrations. 

Evaluation:
This story is not a tremendously difficult read.  It allows a young reader to learn the rhythm and text by having the same conversation between different animals throughout the course of the story.  The author also guide the reader by giving visual clues as to which character was speaker when.  I think that this was a great tool for the author to use because it allows new readers to have a visual representation of how there can be more than one character speaking within one story or even page.  This is something that I believe can be very difficult for a new reader to understand and process.  Like many children’s books Carle does a nice job of using personification in his story.  The animals all exhibit human traits by talking, singing, and dancing.  The story could also be interpreted as exhibiting allegory.  I point this out because the story can have more than one meaning.  It can be seen on the most superficial level, which is that the story is about friends that like to have fun together.  However, the story could also be interpreted as being about inclusion and not excluding friends that may be different than you.  Another interpretation that could be taken when looking at the story as a whole would be how other people around the world communicate their thoughts and language.  Eric Carle also uses a small amount of onomatopoeia in the story as well.  The reader can see examples of this when the animals “talk” to the human friend in their animal language. 

Illustrations:
The illustrations are interesting because it is a little bit different than classic Eric Carle books.  This story not only had Eric Carle illustrations but it also had Kazuo Iwamura illustrations as well.  I loved how the illustrations were also done in different ways, so the reader was able to see how the same story could be illustrated in different ways.

Mini-Lesson:
This mini-lesson will focus on personification.  Students will get to pick an animal from the story and have the animal tell us about where they were coming from and what they were doing.  The students will tell us if this is something that could really happen? Or if we were using personification.  How can we know?