Image Credit: Tomie dePaola on Amazon Illustration from The Magical World of Strega Nona Image Credit: Tomie dePaola on Amazon Illustration from The Magical World of Strega Nona Image Credit: Tomie dePaola on Amazon Illustration from The Magical World of Strega Nona Letter from Tomie dePaola “Everyone always wants to know just how Strega Nona…
Category: Looking at Lit Book Club
Strega Nona Picture Book Series by Tomie dePaola – A Chronoligcal List with Dates of Publication
Strega Nona Series Strega Nona (1975) Big Anthony and the Magic Ring (1979) Strega Nona’s Magic Lessons (1982) Merry Christmas, Strega Nona (1986) Strega Nona Meets Her Match (1993) Strega Nona—Her Story (1996) Big Anthony—His Story (1998) Strega Nona Takes a Vacation (2000) Brava, Strega Nona!: A Heartwarming Pop-Up Book (2008) Strega Nona’s Harvest (2009) Strega Nona’s Gift (2011) Strega Nona Does It Again (2013) Strega Nona…
Read to Write – Take Natalie Babbitt’s Advice: The Best Way to Learn to Write Is to Read
Read to Write When Natalie Babbitt was asked for her advice to writers, her answer was: “Read.” On August 1, join me for a FREE online study of Natalie Babbitt’s Tuck Everlasting. Within a few words, we’ll discover that Babbitt follwed her own advice. In many ways, Tuck Everlasting is a tribute to Ray Bradbury’s…
Tuck Everlasting Chapter 7 – The Tucks Tell Their Story – Where They Came From & Why – Why They Stopped Aging
It was the strangest story Winnie had ever heard. She soon suspected they had never told it before, except to each other—that she was their first real audience; for they gathered around her like children at their mother’s knee, each trying to claim her attention, and sometimes they all talked at once, and interrupted each…
Tuck Everlasting Chapter 6 – Winnie Is Whisked Away but Calmed by the Music Box – Power of Music
At the end of Chapter 5, Winnie and Jesse were tangling. She wanted to drink from the pool in the Wood, and Jesse did not want her to do that. Suddenly. she was whisled away:: “Afterward, when she thought about it, it seemed to Winnie that the next tew minutes were only a blur. First…
Tuck Everlasting – Chapter 5 – Winnie’s First Venture into the Wood – Read to Learn about Mankind’s Connection to Trees, Nature Writing, Description, and Creating Characters – Jesse Tuck
Chapter 5 takes place the morning after Winnie, her grandmother, and the man in the yellow suit heard the twinkling sound coming from the Wood. “Winnie woke early next morning. The sun was only just opening its own eye on the eastern horizon and the cottage was full of silence.” Babbitt, Tuck, pg. 22 Winnie…
Tuck Everlasting Chapter 4 – A Brush with Darkness – Read to Learn to Write with Literary Themes – More Character Development & The Use of Ambiguity in Writing – Celebrating the Moon
Chapter 4 of Tuck Everlasting deals with the literary theme of Darkness Versus Light. Not surprisingly, this chapter takes place during the Evening — the Dark Time of Day, but right away, we realize that Winnie is catching fireflies–an actvity that introduces light into the darkness. She is not a dark character. Like a firefly…
Tuck Everlasting Chapter 3 – A Lesson in “Showing” and Not “Telling”
. In Chapter 3 of Tuck Ever lasting, Natalie Babbitt teaches potential writers a lesson about “Showing” and not “Telling,” as we meet Winifred Foster. Babbitt doesn’t “Tell” us much about WInifred in this chapter. Rather, we are able to glean an unerstanding of who she is [or“See” her] by overhearing her conversation with a…
Tuck Everlasting Chapter 2 – A Lesson in Creating Characters, Conflict, and Foreshadowing in Writing
Chapter 2 of Tuck Everlasting provides us with a beginning Character Study of Mae Tuck, as she is about to enter a new chapter of her life — a New Dawn. And so, at dawn, that day in the first week of August, Mae Tuck woke up and lay for a while beaming at the…
Tuck Everlasting Chapter 1 – Capturing the Essence of the Spiritual in Nature: A Lesson in Descriptive Writing – Read to Learn to Write
Chapter 1 of Tuck Everlasting contrasts the eternal, perfect freedom of nature, as opposed to the rigid, confined existence outside of nature–specifically to that in the Foster’s Home in Treegap, the town at the edge of the Wood or Nature. “The road that led to Treegap had been trod out long before by a herd…