The Snowy Day

Keats, E. J. (1962). The Snowy Day. New York, NY: The Viking Press.

Brief Annotation: This is an adorable story of the magic of a snowy day. Although the fun filled snowy day is over another one will soon follow. The Snowy Day is a well-written picture book. It would be very useful in teaching an emerging reader. The author’s use of words like s-l-o-w-l-y, plop and crunch are useful in helping students to learn phonics, phonemes for even younger children. The short sentences and frequent line breaks would also be beneficial for a child reading this book.

Genre: Picture book

Grade Level: Pre K-1

Readers who will like this: This would be a fun book to read to young children because you could exaggerate the text with playful tones. It would also be good for new readers who have mastered the repetitive one line per page books.

Response/Rating (1-4): 4, I enjoyed the writing style. Overall I thought the book was fantastic (except for the hyphen on the first page, that could be confusing) I also found it fascinating that it won the Cadecotte Medal in 1963 when diversity wasn’t common in children’s picture books (not that it is all that common today). I think that when a simple picture book is a first round pick for The One hundred Books that Shaped the Century it says a lot about how well written and magical the story is.

One question you would ask before a read aloud: What is your favorite thing to do on a snow day?

Reading Strategies Connection: I think it would be fun to do an “Upside-down books” activity (Yopp Yopp pp. 139). Some children may not believe that snow days are fun, maybe because it is cold, wet or because they had to miss a day of school. This would be a fun way to practice writing, learn new descriptive words, and have an arts and crafts project. The children could express their beliefs about snow days in drawings as well as words. It would be an interactive project and everyone could learn about new things to do on snow days.