Runaway Radish

Haas, J. (2001). Runaway Radish. Illustrated by Margot Apple. Published in the United States: Harper Children’s Books.

Brief Annotation: Radish the pony teaches Judy and Nina how to ride a horse among other life lessons. But Judy outgrew Radish and gave him to Nina, and now Nina is also too big for him. They decide to give Radish to a horse camp where smaller children can ride him and learn those valuable lessons in life.

Genre: Contemporary Realistic Fiction

Grade Level: Grade 2- Grade 6

Readers who will like this: A reader who has an interest in horses, especially interested in learning to ride a horse would enjoy the plot of this story. This book also has five small chapters so it would work well for a student who enjoys the idea of reading a book simply because it has chapters.

Response/Rating (1-4): Overall, I would rate Runaway Radish as a 3.

One question you would ask before a read aloud: Has anyone ever gone on a horse or a pony ride? Does anyone in class know how to ride a horse?

Reading Strategies Connection: Clusters (Tompkins pg. 21). Clusters are spider-web type diagrams to draw out ideas, words, or phrases from a book. There are unorganized and organized clusters. An unorganized cluster looks like a sun, with many rays coming out of a center circle. The circle is the topic, and the rays are brainstorming ideas. Organized clusters are a hierarchy of ideas. The middle circle has the main topic, with branched off circles depicting the big ideas of the topic. The big ideas have rays that supply the details. Clusters are a visual representation of student’s ideas, and therefore work really well for students who are visual learners. For this activity, we will be creating organized clusters. The initial step for creating a cluster is to select a topic. Our topic will be the book Runaway Radish. The students need to identify what the big ideas of the story and draw a ray to the center circle for each idea. The name of the idea gets put into the center of the circle. The final step is to complete the cluster by writing details related to each big idea on the ray stemming from each circle. During the process, the teacher’s role is to aid and encourage the students to organize their thoughts and help them to think of additional words and phrases. For example, the main idea is the horse Radish, the big ideas are the owners/places he has stayed, and the supporting details would be what happened while Radish was in the care/presence of the big idea places.