Bears In The Night

To me, "I Can Read" is a death sentence for a good story.   A child might be able to read it, but would she want to? 

A story should be beautiful and satisfying, something to be enjoyed.  The best stories are, of course, also the most educational; but I doubt whether anyone wrote a good story by setting out to be educational first.   

So when my son produced an "I Can Read" title from the children's nook at our meat market, I inwardly groaned and pooh-poohed and rolled my sophisticated eyes.  The Berenstains wrote it?  Poor folks.  I hope they didn't suffer much.



It was nothing but prepositional phrases.



And it was marvelous.



You know what you can do with prepositional phrases?  You can tell the story of a bedful of bear cubs decide to go investigate a nighttime noise.  With prepositions you can get them out of bed, to the window, down the tree, and around the landscape.  Because there are a quantity of cubs, you can use the same prepositional phrases multiple times, craftily placed against the illustrations, to create a follow-the-leader scenario.  And you can use them all yet again when the bear cubs hastily conclude bed is the best place to be after all.

And  by combining your magical phrases with simple, exciting drawings you can fire a child's imagination, and maybe send him out the window and through the forest on a nighttime excursion of his own.