Patricia Polacco

Zullo teaches the intermediate students. Gathering on the carpet for the initial part of the literacy block (one hour and fifteen minutes), Ms. Zullo began the whole-group lesson by reviewing what the students had been working on. They are completing a unit on Patricia Polacco, studying the author in-depth to discover what kind of person she is and how her life has influenced her writing. Ms. Zullo asked the students to brainstorm what they remembered about the author and wrote these ideas on the Smart Board. The students remembered that Patricia Polacco suffered from dyslexia, that she was born in Michigan and lived in California, that her grandparents played an important role in her life and that she bases several of her stories on her childhood. Ms. Zullo prompted the students to recall what they know about Polacco as a writer. The students remembered that she writes with descriptive language, that she elicits emotion from the reader, that certain themes recur in her stories, such as perseverance and friendship. They observed that the setting is often a school and that she employs real events of her life to bring detail to the story. Ms. Zullo told the students that she would be reading the first half of a book by Patricia Pollaco that they had not yet read, An ‘A’ From Mrs. Keller. Ms. Zullo read the brief description from the book jacket and explained to the students that you can find clues regarding the story from reading the “blurb”. After reading the description,…

Patricia Polacco is a beloved American children’s author and illustrator. Though she lives with Dyslexia, she graduated high school and continued on to earn a Master’s on Fine Arts in painting and a Ph.D. in Russian and Greek iconographic history (Do I cite this? Common knowledge? Contemporary Author’s Online). She did not actually begin her writing career until she was 41 years old. Thirty years later, she now has had fifty-five children’s books published, all from a variety of topics.…

Bully by Patricia Polacco, is centered on the lives of two friends named Lyla and Jamie and Gage the mean popular girl who taunts them. Lyla and Jamie both meet on the first day of school and immediately hit it off. Then Lyla makes the cheerleading squad and things begin to suddenly change. The most popular girl in her grade then invites Lyla, to join her clique. Overnight, Lyla is popular and now belongs to the group everyone wishes to belong to. Lyla begins to realize, these so called new…

For my multicultural book I selected The Keeping Quilt by Patricia Polacco. Polacco tells a story about her family. Her great- gramma made a quilt out of a quilt out of the family clothes and passed it down from generation to generation. Along the way Patricia uses the quilt to help explain the Russian culture of birth, wedding and death. The book is also accompanied by beautiful black and white pictures which show the different dress throughout the times. How the women went from wearing…

The Importance of Friendship Friendship is, by definition, a relationship between two friends. Some believe that friendships are a necessity for human life. Joseph Conrad was a man who grew up not having many friends. As a young child he had missed school quite a bit from illnesses (Kathleen Wilson 200). This made it hard to have close relationships with other children. He did however gain a love for literature and the sea from his father at a young age (www.notablebiographies.com). This is…

Although the majority believed that a princess should be proper and follow the social norms of her day, others believed that a princess should have their own voice and live a life of freedom and choice. In the novel Dealing With Dragons by Patricia Wrede, Cimorene was overwhelmed with the expectations of society and longed for her freedom. This longing manifested inside her until she decided to ignore the manipulating society and escape to a land where her freedom cascaded around her. Cimorene…

and the frightening feeling of the unknown? If you take all of those feelings and heighten them to a new level that is how I felt. I have been on pins and needles all today, packing to go off to college. Because of my desire to pursue a degree in education, I had chosen to attend Texas A&M University, which was three hours away from my hometown. After several trips to the car, I was just about ready to hit the road. I traveled with no idea what to expect starting school in a completely new city.…

Patricia Highsmith’s novel The Talented Mr. Ripley and Anthony Minghella’s 1999 screen adaptation of the same name delve into the life of a man with a talent for impersonation, fraud and his desire to obtain a lush lifestyle beyond his means. Sexuality and eroticism play a key role in the film adaptation. The precursor novel does not portray Tom Ripley as an overt homosexual, it displays the character as a sexually ambiguous individual. However, in the film it is evident that Ripley would rather…

is when Gault murdered Rachael. Cornwell had had Kay and Benton go back and forth talking about the scene and using words such as crimson blood and fleshy white. This was my opinion on the book From Potter’s Field. I have just connected to what Rachael might have felt when Temple Gault put the dead dog on her bed, I have visualized the life’s of the characters at the end of the book, and I have evaluated the whole book From Potter’s Field. Everything about this book is fantastic and I wish…

Serving as a method of narration, literary point of view is, in fact, the “eye” and the “ear” of the readers and the audience, through which people are able to have access to the imaginary world in the novels and the films. Different points of views will lead to various angles and perspectives upon the same individuals, events or actions, and thus bring about divergent interpretations of the emotions, feelings, and comprehensions. Therefore, to analyze the literary point of view in the…