Mouse TV by Matt Novak

I chose this book because I thought that it was going to be cute and I was right. This was a very cute book! It was another that after I read it once I thought it was just for entertainment's sake, but after thinking about it I discovered that there was more value to it than that. The story starts with a large mouse family who likes to watch TV. The problem is that they can never agree on what it is that they should watch. The dad mouse wants to watch action, mama wants to watch a comedy and so on. It goes through all the different genres of TV show that you could possibly want to watch. Than one day, the TV is broken and the mouse family is a little lost at first. Then they start to entertain themselves in other ways. I liked this because, even though I do enjoy turning on the tube at the end of a long day, I feel like there is too much emphasis on it these day, especially with our youth. This book could be used for a bunch of different things. It could be a topic starter to get to know students. You could have them talk about what kind of TV they like to watch and then maybe they could get into groups and put together a skit that would show what their genre was. This would be good for planning and writing skills, as well as using imaginations to come up with props and everything. this book could also be used as the jumping off point to talk about what we could do with our time besides watch TV. Two of my favorite things about this book though? One, the mouse family was all together when they were deciding how to spend their time and two, they decide to read a book. One thing though about the book that was interesting to me. We know from the beginning of the book that the dad mouse likes action/adventure, and what kind of story finally gets read at the end of the book? An action/adventure story is read by the dad. I don't know what this means really but it felt significant to me that the dad is the only one whose genre was addressed.

All in all, I really enjoyed this book and more than that, it could truly be useful in the classroom. Ages 3 to 6.