Once Upon An Ordinary School Day
There’s something slightly subversive about many of the English children’s books that I love best. Think Alice in Wonderland, anything and everything by Roald Dahl, The Reluctant Dragon and The Borrowers, to name just a few. Their contrarian quality—good-bye to the rules, the expected, the ordinary—can show up even in picture books. And I was delighted to discover it in Once Upon An Ordinary School Day.
The story opens with the usual routines, reported in dead-pan prose:
Once upon an ordinary school day, an ordinary boy woke from his ordinary dreams, got out of his ordinary bed, had an ordinary pee and an ordinary bath, put on his ordinary clothes, and ate his ordinary breakfast.
The ordinary boy brushed his ordinary teeth, kissed his ordinary mom goodbye, and set off for his ordinary school.
But the story proceeds to twit convention when something quite out of the ordinary happens. The students see it before the readers do. And the look on their faces says, among other things: Turn the page!
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If you’ve got a Family Literacy Night com-
Instead of encouraging kids to spend time poring over the pictorial side of a state map, this lift-the-flap book directs their attention to the index on the flip side.
You can probably tell I love maps. I think they’re beautiful and fascinating, and I can pore over them endlessly with the same cheerful abandon that I bring to reading dictionaries.


Here’s a single-sheet book that’s simple enough for kinder-
What goes inside? For kindergarten, you could give the kids pictures of themselves, their school and a recognizable landmark or two to cut up and glue inside. For 1st grade, you could have the kids combine photos (the kids, the school) with their drawings of neighborhood places—library, fire house, police station, corner store, park, laundromat, and the like. For 2nd through 4th grades, snippets from actual maps can join the mix to complement your geography focus.
My colleague Susie devised a nifty triangle-shaped accordion book as a way for kids to make sense of the food pyramid. The idea was for kids to fill each page with pictures of foods in a given category—by drawing their own, using food stickers, coloring line art, cutting up cooking-magazine photos, or all of the above. It was an invitation to make a mess, and kids loved it.
The cartoon is by Tom Fishburne; read what he says about it on his
I like nonsense.
Here’s what the pop-up structure looks like before kids start drawing, collaging and writing. It’s called a box pop-up, and you can download wonderfully clear pictorial instructions for folding and cutting the pop-up by