Robert Munsch’s Mud Puddle reads like a tiny masterpiece of oral storytelling compressed into thirty-two pages: brisk, comic, cumulative, and animated by a single, delightfully absurd conceit — a mud puddle that repeatedly “jumps on” a child and gets her “completely all over muddy.” The story began as a tale told in a nursery school … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Mud Puddle by Robert Munsch
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Thomas’ Snowsuit by Robert Munsch
Thomas' Snowsuit by Robert Munsch turns a domestic, wintertime battle into an energetic miniature drama: a small boy resists the ritual of being bundled for cold weather, and the adult attempt at care escalates into a comic standoff. The narrative depends on repetition, mounting absurdity, and a tight point of view that keeps the reader … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Thomas’ Snowsuit by Robert Munsch
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch
At first glance The Paper Bag Princess is the kind of picture book one might read in five minutes and, in good conscience, tuck back on a shelf. Read closely, however, it behaves more like a miniature manifesto: a tight, witty demolition of fairy-tale expectations that nevertheless leaves room to teach — not by sermonizing, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Paper Bag Princess by Robert Munsch
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
A. A. Milne’s The House at Pooh Corner (1928) stands as one of the most quietly profound works in children’s literature—a book that, under the gentle veil of whimsy, reflects deeply on friendship, identity, and the fleeting nature of childhood. Though often shelved as a companion to Winnie-the-Pooh, it is, in many ways, the more … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The House at Pooh Corner by A. A. Milne
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
Few works of children’s literature invite as sustained a double-vision as A. A. Milne’s Winnie-the-Pooh: at once an apparently simple collection of episodic adventures for very young readers and a compact, artful meditation on friendship, play, authority, and the strange temporality of childhood. Published in 1926, the book wears its modesty like a costume—genial, unassuming, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Winnie the Pooh by A. A. Milne
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
Charlie Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse reads at first like a picture book and ends up feeling like a pocket philosopher’s manual: sparse in language, lavish in feeling, and insistently human. In fifty or so short panels — a handful of words on each page, hand-lettered and paired with loose, … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia (a seven-book sequence first published 1950–1956) is at once a cornerstone of modern children’s literature and a knot of theological, mythic and cultural tensions. Read as a sustained experiment in imaginative pedagogy, the books deploy fairy-tale economy—clear moral polarities, archetypal figures, and episodic structure—to teach, to delight, and … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book (1894) sits oddly and brilliantly between children’s tale and moral fable, between ethnographic curiosity and wild lyric. Read simply as a collection of animal stories, it is superb entertainment: taut, vivid, and full of suspense. Read as literature, it becomes a compact study in moral pedagogy, imperial imagination, and narrative voice — … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Instructions by Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman’s Instructions is a compact yet expansive meditation on life’s inherent contradictions—a guidebook that is as much about the journey as it is about the destination. In this work, Gaiman subverts the traditional genre of the manual, imbuing a seemingly prosaic format with layers of allegorical richness and mythic resonance. The text invites readers to view … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Instructions by Neil Gaiman
The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Wolves in the Walls by Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman’s The Wolves in the Walls stands as a singular achievement in children’s literature—a text that oscillates between the realms of playful fantasy and unsettling dread. In this picture book, Gaiman expertly harnesses the power of narrative ambiguity to provoke a deeper meditation on the boundaries between the safe confines of the domestic sphere and the … Continue reading The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – The Wolves in the Walls by Neil Gaiman
The New Renaissance Mindset 