From: kelly jones <keejones>
Date: Tue, 03 Feb 1998 11:49:04 PST

As a pre-service teacher here at the Univ of Colorado, we had a brief exposure to the book "Out of the Dust" in a class where we were discussing genre. Several books were passed out to groups (mostly Newberry Honor Winners of this year, as well as Caldecott winners) and my group received "Out of the Dust." We all immediately classified it as a mix of Historical, Realism, Fiction. After some more discussion about our choice of genre, we were surprised to finally OPEN the book and find the poetic verse. We all read a few pages out loud to eachother and were impressed by how moved we were by the words on each page. I continued to read while our teacher went on (I just couldn't put it down). I was deeply drawn to and absorbed in the emotion and visual pictures I was forming in my head. I found the book and it's use of poetry to be a wonderful vehicle for this story (and I haven't even read the entire book!). I remember thinking this was pretty deep stuff for children (remember I am new at this), but recently I was caught by what someone wrote regarding Repunzel: in that children can take a lot more from books than we give them credit. I don't think as a teacher I should make those assumptions about children and their opininos and capabilites of literature.

Thank you for you time, Kelly Jones

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Received on Tue 03 Feb 1998 01:49:04 PM CST