Professional Development and Community School Leaders and Administration Whole School
Before I moved to California, I had the pleasure of being part of a children’s book club—a group of adults who gathered together once a month to read and discuss children’s books. Last summer I got back together with those friends and learned about many recent publications, including a new favorite, Duck! Rabbit!, written by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and illustrated by Tom Lichtenheld.
This captivating picture book takes the reader through a disagreement between two unidentified speakers. The disagreement is about a series of pictures. Depending upon how you look at them, the illustrations could portray either a rabbit or a duck. But neither is correct — or both are — depending on your perspective. I think children will find the book engrossing and could puzzle for hours over which is the “right way” to see things.
In addition to being fun and engaging, this book could be a starting point for discussing the value of perspective-taking. For instance, as you bring your classroom rules to life this fall, you might use the book to initiate work on about how to disagree respectfully, why it’s important to listen, how to hear other people’s ideas, or why it’s helpful to put ourselves in other people’s shoes.
Margaret Berry Wilson is the author of several books, including: The Language of Learning, Doing Science in Morning Meeting (co-authored with Lara Webb), Interactive Modeling, and Teasing, Tattling, Defiance & More.