Where the Wild Things Are

Bibliographic Citation

Sendak, M. (1963). Where the Wild Things Are. HarperCollins.

About the Book

A mischievous little boy gets sent off to this room before supper time after using a not so friendly tone of voice with his mom. He sees his room transform into a forest and sails off on a year long voyage to the land of wild things. There, he gets named “king of all wild things” and all is fun and games until he begins to miss the people who truly love him. Surprisingly when he returns home, he realizes his supper is still hot.

Where the Wild Things Are has everything you want in a picture book and more. It’s meaningful text is short, yet it teaches a strong message to readers about children’s imagination, overcoming fears, and how parent-child relationships are built on love, but can sometimes be a little complicated. It’s many themes are truisms that can be easily relatable to a world wide audience. It has gorgeous two page spread illustrations that convey the main characters emotions and fears. Finally, the illustrations in the book are helpful for emergent readers to get the gist of the story without fully reading the text.

Connections

Book trailer:

Books with similar themes:

• Journey by Aaron Becker

• Chalk by Bill Thomson

Other books by author:

• Bumble-ardy

• My Brother's Book

Teaching ideas:

• This book can be used to reach many reading skills such as character development, theme, visualization, inferencing, and making predictions.

• This could be used as the basis of a writing project where students write and illustrate about what they would do if they were named king or queen of a foreing land.

Requirement the Book Meet

• Required book list