A World of Food by Carl Warner
Why I picked it up
A book that consists entirely of colorful lands of food, how could I resist? I do judge books by their cover and this one has a strikingly beautiful picture of a fairy tale candy house – yes please!
Why I finished it
Each page is as mesmerizing as the cover and dedicated to one color. The pictures are foods arranged to create a food-scape, if you will, that you could study for hours. A mix of playing with food and the similarities to I Spy books had me hooked. Pictures aside, the text is catchy because of its lyrical nature and description of the setting.
Who I’d give it to
This book is a great read aloud for students in Kindergarten through fifth grade, though it could easily serve as a mentor text to a middle school class. From the youngest child poring over colors and examining each piece of the food-scape to identify favorites to the older child listening to the poetry and watching the food come alive, this story is sure to engage.
Integration Ideas
Reading and Writing Poetry
In Kindergarten through second grade this book lends itself to a lively discussion. As I read each page with my six year old, we stopped and talked about the vocabulary and identified all the foods that were used in the pictures. In a classroom setting, I would have the students add foods of a particular color that they don’t see on the page. What could be added to the picture? Extend this idea into their writers workshop time. Students can list foods that are their favorite color, design a landscape and write.
This book can be extended further in the upper grades by writing color poems. Read Write Think has a great site for a lesson in writing colorful poetry (http://tinyurl.com/poemcolor). I see a class book in the future!
As I was reading I couldn’t help but remember one of my favorite childhood poets, Shel Silverstein. He has a fun poem called “Colors” that could easily be used with this lesson.
Technology
Students can obviously design their own food-scapes on paper and color, but why not add a touch of technology? Flickr has a great tool that will allow students, or teacher, to sort pictures by a selected color. Multicolor Search Powered by MulticolorEngine can inspire creativity in your digital natives. Please remember, that Flickr is not necessarily censored for classroom use. Always check it out before you introduce it to the students.
We’d love to hear how this worked in your class!
Leave a Reply