Title: Beautiful Oops!
Genre: Paper Engineered
Author: Barney Saltzberg
Major Awards: None
Age Group: Pre-K-1st grade
This is a paper engineered, pop-up heavy book about seeing the magic in making mistakes. With each page, there is a statement about a mistake being made in school, and how you should see the beauty in it. For example, one page states, "Every spill has lots and lots of possibilities!" Here, a juice spill transforms from a spill to a spill that is shaped like an elephant, using pop-up features. Another page states, "Bent paper is something to celebrate." Here, the actual page of the book is bent and the illustrator made the bent paper into a penguin head, and drew the rest of the body below it. There is also a page that says, "A scrap of paper can be fun to play with." Here, a piece of newspaper is painted to look like a dog. At the end, it states, "When you think you have made a mistake, think of it as an opportunity to make something beautiful!" Here, the illustrator wrote the word 'mistake', but one word was misspelled. It looks as if he then tore a piece of paper and covered up the misspelled letter. Then, he took the rest of the unused paper and made a lamb out of it.
I enjoyed this book so much, and will definitely have it in my classroom! It is a bit hard to explain in words how well done the pop-ups were throughout the book, but they were amazing! I like how this book teaches the lesson that there is beauty in mistakes, and good can come from them if you are willing to look for it. It is definitely a silly book, so children would love it even without seeing the underlying message!
I believe that Pre-K through first grade would gain the most from this book. There are only a few words on each page, and the words are huge, so I think that this would be a great one for early readers. The illustrations and pop-ups are outstanding, and I really think that young children would enjoy this story because of that alone. This would be a great read aloud, as well!
In my classroom, I could give each student an oddly-shaped piece of newspaper, and have them paint a picture that could come from that shape. I could also fold over a piece of card stock paper at the top, and the students would have to come up with an animal that could come from that shape. I also found a prompt I could give my students that says, "An oops can be beautiful because...", and the students would have to tell me something good that can come from a mistake. We would also have a class discussion on mistakes, and I would explain that mistakes are how we learn, and not every mistake is such a bad thing!
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