Fiction/Picture Book

Title: Where the Wild Things Are

Author: Maurice Sendak




About the Author: For more than forty years, the books Maurice Sendak has written and illustrated have nurtured children and adults alike and have challenged established ideas about what children's literature is and should be. Winner of the 1964 Caldecott Medal for Where the Wild Things Are, in 1970 Sendak became the first American illustrator to receive the international Hans Christian Andersen Award, given in recognition of his entire body of work. In 1983, he received the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award from the American Library Association, also given for his entire body of work.

Age Level: 4-8

Synopsis: Max is a wild child who gets sent to bed without supper after threatening to eat his mom. When he is in his room he begins to use his imagination and a forest grows. Max boards a boat and imagines himself sailing away to the land of the wild things. The monsters roared when he arrived but Max wasn’t scared. Max tames the monsters with a magic trick, they became frightened calling him the most wild thing of all and made him king of all the wild things. Max returns to his room to find his dinner, still hot!

Pre-Reading Activities: Discuss with the class the importance of using your imagination. Discuss why we use our imagination. Who uses their imagination every day? Do you travel to all different kinds of places? What do you think of Max’s imagination? Have you ever had an imagination just like Max’s?

Post-Reading Activities: What was your favorite part of the story? Has your mother ever sent you to bed without dinner because you were misbehaving? If you were max would you have been scared of the wild things? After reading the story, students will receive a blank stapled booklet. The students will create their own version of the story and illustrate it. They will use their imagination to create a unique story.

My Reflection: This book is such an inspiration for using your imagination, yet it provides a nice balance of children’s needs for imaginative thinking but has a sense of limits. This book allows children to close their eyes and create an imaginary place to travel to. They decide what it looks like, who or what lives there, and what they will do. Children can relate to Max and his thoughts. This book allows children to relate to people not understanding them or even the fact that they might not understand themselves yet. It shows that when children are upset about something or have a problem they can disappear with their imaginations and think about things on their own.

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