#7- The Brave Little Owl

7) The Brave Little Owl

Written by: Penny Little

Illustrated by: Sean Julian

Scholastic, Inc.

2012

31 pages

Picture Book

            Honestly, I was attracted to this book because I love owls. If you see the cover of the book, they’re just so cute! (I am a girl, thus, I cannot refuse a cute animal book.) This book is about a family of owls who are deciding what to get their Grandmother for her birthday. The baby owl decides that she wants to learn to fly for her present. Her grandfather teaches the young owls in a group, and baby owl struggles to learn. She tries and tries, and even with encouragement from other forest friends, she cannot learn to fly. Finally, her Grandpa comes back and helps her fly just in time for her Grandma’s birthday celebration.

            The illustrations in this book are, more than anything, plain old cute. They are painted cartoons with many details. Each illustration takes up a whole page, and each page is a different color. This helps keep the reader’s interest peaked. The words in the story are sometimes printed to match the word itself. For example, the word “falling” would slightly run down the page. That was also a neat element.

            I would recommend this book for children up to about second grade. The vocabulary is not very challenging, and is probably a good read aloud for young children. This book would be good to leave out for the students to read on their own in first or second grade. You could use this book in a character study about bravery or encouragement. It would also be good to read if your school system celebrated Grandparent’s Day. It’s always a good book to read after lunch to settle the children back down. While the plot was fairly generic, the illustrations make this book an interesting book for the classroom.