Why I Picked It Up: We found If You Had a Jetpack on the “new” shelf at our local public library. Jetpacks are frequently featured in my son’s imaginary adventures, so this book seemed to fit! I flipped through it and was drawn to the diagram-like illustrations, so we checked it out!
Why I Finished It: I had to fight this one away from my oldest to actually read it! When we finally got to read it out loud together, If You Had a Jetpack definitely surpassed my expectations! I was reminded of the If You Give… series by Laura Numeroff. While it isn’t a completely circular story, If You Had a Jetpack does follow a similar structure as the story builds off the hypothetical situation posed at the beginning: “If you found yourself bored with nothing to do, you could build your own jetpack.”
If You Had a Jetpack is a wild, crazy, imaginative adventure that had my kids giggling the whole time we were reading. The illustrations are very detailed and definitely captured their attention as we returned to this book many, many times (the library finally called and said they really wanted their book back – it’s been renewed to the max!). The sibling/family relationship in the story, while not incredibly prominent, is very sweet and definitely worth highlighting. I have a feeling many students will be able to identify with one or both of the brothers! Of course, the main character is also an inventor, so there’s also a connection to tinkering, building, and generally being creative. Finally, my personal favorite part of this story is the inclusion of incredible adverbs on just about every page!
Who I’d Give It To: If You Had a Jetpack is a great read-aloud starting in PreK. My 5- and 2-year-old didn’t get the adverbs, but the inclusion of that vocabulary expands the range of this book into upper elementary where it could certainly be used as a mentor text for word choice.
Integration Ideas
Vocabulary – Adverbs
The adverbs in If You Had a Jetpack really steal the show! While the story is fun and engaging, the adverbs on each page really underscore the text, adding an additional layer of meaning that can help students understand what this part of speech is all about.
I’m willing to bet that adverbs aren’t anyone’s favorite part of speech to teach. I was always taught that adverbs “modify the verb,” but what does that mean anyway?? Simply put, adverbs give more information about other words in the sentence. Adverbs can answer the questions: how? when? where? and how much?
In If You Had a Jetpack, the adverbs mainly fall into the how? category. You could read the story without the adverbs, but they definitely add more information to the page! Pick one of the pages to project or display for the students. Read the text of the story without the adverb at the bottom of the page. Talk about the tone of the page, how the text goes with the picture, etc. Then have students look up the adverb (dictionary skills!) to determine what it means and then discuss what new information that word adds to the page. Finally, look up synonyms for that adverb (thesaurus skills!) and see if there are any other words that might work. How would the tone and meaning of the page change with a different adverb?
Challenge students to see what kind of information they could add to their writing by adding adverbs to their own writing!
Makerspace/Storytelling
If You Had a Jetpack would be a great way to incorporate storytelling into a makerspace. A makerspace combines the ideas that “‘Nothing is impossible,’ and ‘Everything you touch is an adventure,'” (from Scholastic Administrator Article), and that’s certainly what this book represents as well. With those ideas in mind, students can use their creativity and STEM skills to create an object – maybe something real, maybe from a book they’ve read, maybe something completely new that they’ve thought up – and then record the story of that object. In order to do so, students will have to think of characters, plot, setting, etc. It might be something they could write down, or it could also be an oral storytelling project!
How are you using this mentor text?
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