Wake Up Island by Mary Casanova

We welcomed Mary Casanova to our school a few weeks ago.  She is a Minnesota author from Northern Minnesota on Rainy Lake.  She writes picture books, middle grade books and Young Adult books as well.  It is nice to have an author visit who has books for all ages in an elementary school.

In preparation for her visit, I read Wake Up, Island to all of my students in the library media classes. It is her newest book which just came out March 2016.  It is really a poem about an island and animals waking up on a summer morning. She said she was inspired by an early morning canoe ride around an island in her pajamas and she wrote this poem to describe the beauty. It has gorgeous illustrations by a wood cut artist, name Nick Wroblewski from Wisconsin. It is his first picture book project.

As we read the story I found that there was lots to discuss. The younger kids learned lots of vocabulary such as shimmied, root (as in to dig), lichen, graze, plunge, and grubs. We also discussed all of the animals that are found in this book: mallards, deer, spiders, ravens, chickadees, heron, bear, squirrels, moose and our Minnesota bird--the loon.  The  loon page spread is my favorite woodcut of all!  The older students were able to pick out metaphors, onamonapia, personification, rhyme, and other figurative language.  We enjoyed the art and went to the illustrator's web page and watched his movie on how he creates a wood cut print.  The last thing we did is to imagine how we were going to spend a week on an island without using technology or electricity and describe what we would do. Swimming, fishing, tenting, making s'mores, hiking, canoeing and of course reading were some of the activities. It put us into summer mood for sure!

I highly recommend this quieter picture book for some fabulous literature lessons and as a read aloud for all grades.  This is the type of book that lends itself for lots of discussion.

I think this book would be a terrific nominee for the Minnesota Star of the North award and have recommended it to the committee.