The Snowy Day
By: Ezra Jack Keats
It's Throwback Thursday and super snowy in North Carolina which makes it a perfect day to highlight this classic (yet timeless) book written and illustrated by the great Ezra Jack Keats. In The Snowy Day, the main character Peter wakes up one morning to find his neighborhood covered in a blanket of white snow. What ensues after this realization is a day of fun exploring the snowy landscape complete with snow angels, making tracks through the snow, sliding down steep snowy hills, and dodging a snowball fight initiated by the older neighborhood boys. After a day of snow-filled fun he makes his way back to the comfort of his warm home where his mom is waiting for him. He drifts off to sleep that night believing that the sun has come out to melt all the snow away, but when he wakes in the morning he finds the snow is still waiting and ready for him to come and play!
This book is a wonderful story that can be used in writing particularly in the younger grades to illustrate small moments. Helping children see how an author can take a small moment or event in one day and stretch it out to create a story that makes you feel like you are right there in that moment with the character. Using this book and others by Keats, readers can begin to model their own writing after his and take small moments from their own life or something they have experienced to stretch it out to tell their story. Two former colleagues of mine, Courtney Sears and Suzanne Stokes did an incredible job helping their first graders stretch their own small moments after studying the works of Ezra Jack Keats. As part of that unit of study we collaborated to have those same students create their own Peter and Louie books. Peter and Louie are two of Ezra Jack Keats' characters that show up in multiple stories but are very different from one another. After analyzing the characters' traits, we designed a project in which the students created a book that told a story of what would happen if Peter or Louie were to show up at our school! What fun it was reading the students' books and seeing how creative they became using what they knew about the characters to determine how they would behave during a typical school day.
The Snowy Day was the first book written by Keats in 1962 and went on to receive the Caldecott award the following year. Keats was a strong believer in children of color being represented in picture books as heroes and that all readers should see children of different ethnic backgrounds experiencing common childhood situations. He went on to write and illustrate numerous books for children, several of which feature Peter and other characters from his neighborhood. To learn more about Ezra Jack Keats you can view his foundation's website here.
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