My Parent's think I'm Sleeping

My Parent’s think I’m Sleeping

Poems by Jack Prelutsky

Pictures by Yossi Abolafia

Harper Collins Publisher 2007

48 Pages

Children’s Poetry book

This story is full of 44 different poems, there is a new poem on almost each page.  This story is about a young boy who has a wild imagination and is trying to fall asleep.  He starts off by saying his parents think he’s asleep and that he keeps a flash light to explore all the happenings in his bedroom. He travels to a creek; he listens to the alley cats singing along throughout the night. He thinks about the clouds that he saw this afternoon and how calm they looked, and how now they look like their trying to eat him. He dreams of chocolate cake and how he wishes he could eat it, but he’s afraid his dad has already eaten it. The little boy travels to wild imaginative places and tries to go to sleep along the way but just cant seem to. Find out if his parents discover that he’s wide awake, or if he finally falls asleep in My Parent’s think I’m Sleeping.

The illustrations in this book would greatly appeal to younger readers especially little boys. The pictures are very colorful, as well as are full of detail and eye catching. The text is not normal on the pages it goes from top to bottom, different sides of the page, it is based on where the pictures are. The medium used in the story was pen and ink, as well as colored pencils, and water colors. The pictures in the story move all over the page, they go from the top to bottom, as well as from side to side, some pictures overlap onto the next page.  The pictures go along with the poems and are used as a visual aid to help students follow along with the story.

Classroom connections with this story could be used in different ways. One connection you could use could be an English lesson including poetry. The students can write a poem on what they would do if they couldn’t sleep and were laying in their rooms imagining before they fall asleep. This could help their critical, and imaginative thinking. Another connection could be having the students take the story and find all of the rhyming words in the story and then make their own poem using only those words. This would be a great experience for the students to know that writing can be fun, and sometimes you can make funny poems that do not go together. The last connection you can have is an art lesson.  You can have the students into groups and they can make a poster of their favorite picture parts of the stories, and make it like a collage. Once the collages and poems are done you can hang them on the wall in the classroom.