One Upon a Time, the End (asleep in 60 seconds) by Geoffrey Kloske and Barry Blitt

  

Once Upon a Time, the End (asleep in 60 seconds)

Kloske, Geoffrey and Blitt, Barry.  New York: Athenum Books for Young Readers, 2005.  9780689866197.

Quantitative Reading Level:  Reading Level 3.0

Qualitative Reading Analysis: 

I would rate this as Middle Low on the “Text Complexity: Qualitative Measures Rubric for Literary Text”.  What makes this book more challenging is the allusions to so many different fairytales and nursery rhymes.  Readers need to be familiar with those stories so they appreciate the humor in this book and understand what the dad is doing.

Summary:

 

Dad really wants his child to go to sleep but of course the child needs just one more story.  In desperation the dad tries to shorten the stories.  What follows is a romp through “Chicken Little”, The Two Little Pigs, and so many more.  Children will have fun comparing the dad’s versions with the originals.  The dad gets more and more desperate as the story goes on and each tale gets chopped more and more.  This is a fun book.

Content Area: Reading/ELA

Content area standard:

 

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.3.2 Recount stories, including fables, folktales, and myths from diverse cultures; determine the central message, lesson, or moral and explain how it is conveyed through key details in the text. 

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.3.3 Describe characters in a story (e.g., their traits, motivations, or feelings) and explain how their actions contribute to the sequence of events.

CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RL.3.9 Compare and contrast the themes, settings, and plots of stories written by the same author about the same or similar characters (e.g., in books from a series)

Curriculum Suggestions:

Compare and contrast the versions of the fairytales and nursery rhymes with the originals. 

Describe the father and talk about why he was telling stories that way.

Personal Thoughts:

This book is quite funny.  I can relate as a parent.  There are a lot of other “bedtime” story spoofs that could be tied with this including Interrupting Chicken by David Ezra Stein.  This book has a lot of possibilities.

High Interest Annotation:  An exhausted father totally mangles the fairytales in order to get his child to sleep.