Research Journal #1

How could I possibly write a children’s book without going back to a few of my favorites? Originally, I just had fun with this. I visited my little brother last Friday who is four and he was more than happy to help me with my “research”. Together, we read books that I loved such as If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, The Cat in the Hat, The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. Though I feel that the different kinds of art really started to inspire me, I was struggling with how  I would take stories such as these and convey any message about my beliefs on the education system. This lead me to search or some of my favorite books about problem solving from when I was a little girl.

The first book I came across was by Kevin Henkes, Wemberly Worried. My mother used to read this one to me because I worried about everything as a child. It is the story of a little mouse who worries about everything and then finally got to school and meets another little mouse just like her. When they become friends, her worries don’t seem so important anymore. I love this story in regard to my UGP for many reasons. For one, this story centers around anxiety that is later solved with collaboration and kinship with those like Wemberly. Second, and probably most importantly, Henkes uses repetition to create an almost melodic sense to his stories. I loved all of his work when I was young and I remember the sing-song way that my teachers would read to us. This, coupled with the brightly colored illustrations, made Henkes one of my favorite authors for a long time. I would really like to utilize both this music-like reading and the bright colors in my story. However, I would really like my animals to be fro the jungle or the forest and  I was hoping to use watercolor, so I will have to be creative in adapting this style of art.

When I first decided to write a children’s book for this project, I thought of a political cartoon that I saw a few years ago regarding standardized testing. The image was of a monkey, a bird, a goldfish and a lizard and a teacher was telling them all to climb to the top of the tree. For some reason this image drew me to another one of my little brother’s books named Giraffes Can’t Dance by Giles Andreae. It’s a story about a dance in the jungle where all the animals seem to be really good at dancing and the Giraffe is too tall land gangly to dance like everyone else. After he is made fun of, he goes off and is told to dance to his own rhythm by some crickets and he learns to dance i na new way that everyone else comes to love. I really love the message of this book because it touches o the idea of adapting a norm to make it your own so that you can succeed. I think this is a concept I could successfully carry over to my UGP. I also love the art in the jungle animals which  I plan on adapting in my story as well.

I read many children’s books and found that these two had the most impact on my UGP. I feel inspired and I have many ideas for what exactly I could do for my story.