Customer Reviews

How I Spent My Summer Vacation (Dragonfly Books)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book IS perfect for starting off the school year! Teague is outstanding! When will the guy win a Caldecott? Every book he does is filled with magnificent illustrations and incredible stories! I met him a few years ago in California...what a gentleman...ALL CLASS!

I'm a teacher and like to read this book to my students in the first week of school. Then I pose a challenge to them. I challenge them to tell me about their own summer vacation, but like Wallace, start out with the truth, and then let their imagination take over. I get completely ridiculous and fun stories about trips to the lake that end up as coronations as supreme master of planet zoorg. I highly recommend it.

Remember the essay that your teacher always made you write at the beginning of each school year?? "How I Spent My Summer Vacation" is told by the main character Wallace Bleff who stands before the class and weaves an amazing tale of train rides, cowboys, cattle herding and the like while we come along for the ride. (Wallace has quite an imagination.) Loads of fun, beautifully illustrated, and my son's favorite bedtime story.

It has it all--a wild story, vivid drawings, great sense of humor. What an imagination!

I really enjoyed the book. I look forward to sharing this book with my students to start off our school year together. I'm going to use the book to help them get an idea to be creative about his or her own summer vacation to write a great story.

This is a fun "back to school" book with a twist. The main character is asked to write about his summer vacation and he chooses to write something that is obviously fiction. He tells about being kidnapped by cowboys and spends the summer with them instead of with his aunt. I read this book to my second graders on the first day of school and they love it.Part of the way through the book I start hearing comments from them such as "he's not telling the truth", and "he's just kidding". There are many fun activities that can be done using this book as a springboard. I usually have my students write about their summer vacation and it can be the truth or it can be fiction. After their writing is complete they share it with the class and we guess whether it is the truth, or like the boy in the book, fiction.

HOW I SPENT MY SUMMER VACATION by Mark Teague is a 31-page medium format book. There are 31 illustrations. Nine of the illustrations are panoramas, taking up two entire pages.

The plot concerns a boy reading his school paper, regarding his summer vacation, to the class. The illustration shows a desert landscape materializing on the center of the blackboard in the schoolroom. The next illustration shows the boy actually walking on the desert, but still clutching his term paper, and still reading the paper. Along come some cowboys. The cowboys capture the boy, but they are benign cowboys. They give the boy a kid-sized cowboy outfit to wear, and the illustrations show the boy getting lessons in lassoing and making campfires. The landscape contains cacti and mesas. The storyline segues, in part, back to the boy's real-life situation, and it shows the cowboys having a conventional picnic in a grassy back yard. At the picnic, there is a 20th century barbeque grill, and there are 20th century style hot dogs, and slices of watermelon. At any rate, the cattle stampede, and you can see them approaching from the desert, creating massive clouds of dust, and in the background are mesas. The boy stops the cattle by waving a red tablecloth. Then, the illustrations segue back to the classroom.

The writing goes like this: "When summer began, I headed out west. My parents had told me I needed a rest. Your imagination, they said, is getting too wild. It will do you some good to relax for a while. So they put me aboard a westbound train. To visit Aunt Fern in her house on the plains. But I was captured by cowboys, a wild looking crowd, their manners were rough and their voices were loud." The writing in the entire book takes the form of rhyming sentences.

Regarding the illustrations, all of the colors are somewhat dark, as might be found in typical drawings by children. Typically, only adult artists realize that most out-of-doors scenes, especially desert scenes, are much brigher than the colors available in sets of colored pencils, or by sets of Crayola Crayons, or by a typical set of watercolors. (The paintings of Robert Bechtle provide an excellent example of out-of-door scenes that have a brightness more in line with actual out-of-doors brightness) The clouds in Mark Teague's desert resemble the surrealistic desert objects found in deserts of artist, Yves Tanguy. Most of Mark Teague's illustrations take up the entire page, but some have wavey borders, resembling the wavey border of a small puddle of spilled milk. The illustrations are in a realistic style, but not in the sharp-edged, super-realistic style used in children's books by David Wiesner (TUESDAY) or by Jan Brett (OWL & THE PUSSYCAT). I prefer Mark Teague's style of art.

I wish I had a vacation as interesting as this kid!

When giving his BORING report about his BORING vacation... wait, no, that was somebody else. This kid's vacation included being kidnapped. By COWBOYS! And having to stop a cattle stampede! And being a hero!

Good rhymes, great fun, and cute ending with a bull in time for show-and tell. Anybody who's had to suffer through the first day of school blues should get a copy :)

My kids are 6 and 8 and I read out loud to them everyday. They thought this book was a blast. The art work is wonderful, too and really helps the story along.

I used this book with my first graders as a lead in to a writing activity at the beginning of the school year. They loved it!