The Lion and the Mouse

For my folktale picture book I chose to read The Lion & the Mouse by Jerry Pinkney. This book was a winner of the Caldecott Medal in 2010 and is a wordless story illustrated with beautiful artwork by the author. The Lion & the Mouse is a age-old folktale about the king of the jungle, The Lion, who gets caught in a tangled situation where only the smallest of friends, The Mouse, can help. The story is a tale of friendship of how even the quaintest of beings can be the ones to save you when you need help. This book can be used in many ways in the classroom, but I like the idea of incorporating it into a segment about storytelling and how there is more than one way to convey messages and meaning. I like the moral of the story that shows that everyone, big and small, needs help sometimes and how all characters have their worth. I feel like Pinkney did the original Aesop story justice when re-publishing it as a wordless book to create a sense of wonder and imagination, and the illustrations combined with onomatopoeias are enough to tell the story in a new way. You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours!

Pinkney, J. (2009). The lion & the mouse. New York: Little, Brown Books.