The Wolf’s Story: What Really Happened to Little Red Riding Hood, Written by Toby Forward, Illustrated by Izhar Cohen

Summary: This tells the traditional Little Red Riding Hood story from the wolves perspective. It starts with his explanation of his relationship with the Grandmother and how he spent a lot of time at her house doing odd jobs for her and she enjoyed the company. What he didn’t like was that when the girl came, he didn’t get paid any attention. So one day he met the girl as she came up the path and when she didn’t speak to him he ran ahead to beat her home. He met Grandmother at her closet reaching for a dress and when he went to help her she fell, bumped her head, and was knocked out. Not wanting to be blamed for causing any trouble, the wolf slipped the dress on. When the girl came, she was apprehensive of the wolf and tried to feed him her toffee…well he didn’t like this so he got up to run away and just then the woodsman opened the door and cut of his tail as he slipped out. The wolf went all the way to town.

Implementation: I really like the dialogue aspect of this text. I would enjoy hearing students practice expressive read aloud tone. The storytelling idea of this book offers an example to students of different ways to write a story. Furthermore, they could learn to write from a different perspective. I remember reading a story in high school and having to write from a different characters perspective-this paves the way for creativity and imaginative writing that excites children. This book would also serve as a vocabulary practice/using context to decode words…versatile, altered, frightening...