What You Never Knew About Beds, Bedrooms, and Pajamas

Title: What You Never Knew About Beds, Bedrooms, and Pajamas
Genre: Bluebonnet
Author: Patricia Lauber
Major Awards: Texas Bluebonnet Master List
Age Group: 7th-8th grade

This is a story about how beds, bedrooms, and pajamas came to be. The book starts out by stating that humans like to sleep lying down with pillows and blankets, but it has not always been this way. In the Stone Age, it is assumed that people cut boughs from trees, spread hides of furs over them, and used furs as blankets. The Egyptians were the first to use beds, made out of wicker. They later traded grain for wood, and this is how wooden beds came to be. The footboards they made kept the person from sliding off. Greeks had day beds in their homes, and their bedrooms were more like closets than rooms. In the Middle Ages, everyone lived together under one roof, and each person was given a sack and some straw to make a bed. Houses were used as shops during the day, and then were transformed into real houses at night, with beds. In the end, the book talks about how pajamas came to be. Around 1500, daytime and nighttime clothes were becoming popular. People wore normal clothes during the day, and changed into comfy pajamas at night. 

I would not want this book in my classroom. It has some topics in it that can be seen as inappropriate, and I don't think students need to be reading or getting any ideas from this book. It explains in great detail how beds, bedrooms, and pajamas came to be, but there are definitely parts that should have been left out, considering this is a children's book. There are some interesting parts, but overall I was not pleased with the content of this book. I am actually very shocked that this book made the Bluebonnet Master List.

Although I wouldn't recommend this book, I think that if any student read it, they would need to be in at least seventh or eighth grade. They would definitely need to be mature enough to handle its content, so I think it would need to be up to the teacher to decide whether or not her class read it. It is probably intended for elementary students since it is a picture book, but I would not hand it to students these ages. It is also pretty lengthy and wordy for a picture book, so that should be kept in mind, as well. 

In my classroom, I could give the students a chart with different ages and groups of people from the book, and they would have to write what they used for a bed in their time. I could also have them write down interesting facts they learned from the book.