This book is about a whale named Mabel, who is captured and put into an aquarium called “MarineLand”. They put her in a small tank, where she can’t move and isn’t fully under water.  She gets very sad and sick.  Then the doctors and workers figure out they need to move her. They move her to a bigger tank, where she is happy again.  I think this book deals with the environment issue of capturing animals, taking them out of their natural habitat, and putting them behind glass for display.  I think it does a great way of exposing this issue to kids in a way they would understand it. It also does a great job of subtly hinting at why this could be wrong.  

This book is about a goblin-like family.  Hazel, a girl wants to play things, but the adults tell her to let Billy, her baby brother, play too because he’s crying.  He destroys whatever she plays until he eventually falls asleep.  Then she fixes what he broke and plays in peace. I don’t really know the message of this book.  I guess it could be to not take things so seriously because whatever gets broken can be fixed.  I think kids would love this book because the pictures and the goblin-like characters are really interesting to look at.  However, one thing that annoyed me was that the parents never scolded Billy or did anything when he broke things. In this aspect, it might send the message to kids that they will not get punished for messing up other people's things.

This book is about a dog named Louie who is adopted by a family.  However, they quickly learn that he’ll eat anything and everything.  He eats the food in the house, his bowl, the little boy’s toys, and the wooden porch.  The family tried to hire dog trainers, but they never worked and Louie ended up eating something they had.  They were going to get rid of him, especially after he ruined the kid’s birthday party, but the next day he stopped chewing.  Louie outgrew his puppy faze of chewing and became a good dog. I think this is a great book for kids because it is about a dog, which kids love, and it includes comedic situations. I think it teaches a good lesson about growing up.  I think a child can relate to Louie, not the chewing, but in other things like making mistakes or irresponsible choices.  However, the child, like Louie, will grow out of it and be better. 

This book is about a goose who stays at a girl's pond because she has a bad foot.  All the geese exclude her, but the girl becomes her friend.  The goose works every day to make her foot better. Slowly, the goose gets back out there and eventually flies away for winter. At the end of the book, she returns in the summer with a family.  I think the book was great at portraying a message of determination. However, I don't know if I liked the book because it did not have any catchy sayings or names. It was kind of bland. I don't know if kids would have liked it that much because I found myself being bored at times reading it.

This story revolves around Chicken Little, a chicken, who gets hit in the head with an acorn and thinks the sky is falling. He runs around, bumping in to characters (Lucky Ducky, Loosey Goosey, and Turkey Lurkey), and telling them that the sky is falling. They all follow them and end up bumping in to Foxy Loxy, a fox, who offers them safety in side a "cave" (his mouth). The book ends with him sneezing and they all fall out.  This book had so many bright colors, and the illustrations of each animal really added to the story. There were also sounds the animals made, which would be fun to read aloud to children. for children to say. There were also sentences repeated each time he ran into an animal, which were really catchy and would be fun to read aloud. I think the book promotes a very important theme that you can't go along with what people just tell you. All the animals went along with Chicken Little without even thinking twice about it. Also, they ran around without a plan, which was stated in the book multiple times. So another theme could be to be prepared or think things through.