#15

The Three Pigs
By David Wiesner
Clarion Books
2002
38 pages

Traditional Literature

“Little pig, little pig, let me come in.”

            I chose this book for many reasons. I was interested in reading a book by David Wiesner after learning about him in class. I also have recently taught a lesson with the story of the Three Little Pigs, so I was interested in reading this retelling of the story.  This story starts off as an abbreviated story of the classic Three Little Pigs, but as the wolf starts to blow each house down, he blogs the pig right off of the page. The pigs are safe and the pages of the story fly away. The three pigs see another story, so they decide to walk into the picture and see what the story is about. The first story that they walk into is the nursery rhyme, “Hey Diddle Diddle.” When they leave the cat and the fiddle, they become part of a story about a dragon. Suddenly, they get an idea to bring the characters of the story with them, out of the pages. As they travel along the pages of different stories, they go back and find the wolf trying to blow their houses down. As the wolf huffed and puffed and tried to blow down the brick house, the dragon character sticks his head out of the front door and scares the wolf away! From that point on, they all lived happily ever after.

            David Wiesner uses watercolors, gouache, colored inks, pencils and colored pencils on Fabriano hot press paper to makes his illustrations come to life. On the dust jacket is a picture of the three pigs in this story. The endpapers have a grainy brown look, probably to relate to the pigs’ houses. This book has many different types of page layouts.  While some pictures are framed, others are spot art on a blank page. Towards the end of the book when the pigs come out of the story pages, Wiesner uses text bubbles to show us what the pigs are saying to each other.

            This book is appropriate for children in elementary school. They would easily be able to recognize the nursery rhyme of “Hey Diddle Diddle” and be able to relate to the original story of the Three Little Pigs. Wiesner is a three time winner of the Caldecott Medal and a two time recipient of the Caldecott Honor. In the classroom, I would use this book in a learning center for students to compare and contrast different retellings of the original Three Little Pigs. The student would have to draw a Venn diagram and show how each of the stories are alike and different from the original story. This would be a fun activity, but yet an educational one at the same time.