The first thing my aide and I noticed when we unpacked the book shipment which included Cookies:  Bite-Size Life Lessons was the girl on the cover.  She looks amazingly like my aide’s youngest grandaughter!  I included her picture so you can judge for yourself!

Cookies:  Bite-Size Life Lessons is one of the 2009 Monarch Award nominees.  Amy Krouse Rosenthal has created a clever book that presents life-defining vocabulary words such as cooperate, patient, optimist, pessimist, fair, unfair, compassionate and more through cookie analogies.  Not cookie recipes, as you might expect, but recipes for living!  “Trustworthy means, if you ask me to hold your cookie until you come back, when you come back, I will still be holding your cookie.”

As much as I liked the book and appreciated its distinctive approach to character education, I was skeptical about using it as a read aloud.  I didn’t think my students would like it.  But I was wrong – my students ate up this book!  (Hah!  Pun bad, but intended!) In each class they were exceptionally attentive; it gave them something to contemplate, and contemplate they did!  After twenty-two years of reading aloud to K-3, my predictions about what they will or will not like are not often wrong.  But the students still surprise me;  I realize the older I get, the less I know!  Which brings us to Cookies: Bite-Size Life Lessons final entry:  “WISE means, I used to think I knew everything about cookies, but now I realize I know about one teeny chip’s worth.”