To begin, I introduce the concept of copyright date as a book's birthday and where to find it (on the back of the title page--aka the "verso"), and how to use that date to tell how old a book is. Then, to put it into perspective, I tell them the story of my parents hiding the book, (some of them have already asked if I knew Ben Franklin, so they already think I'm ancient), how their parents, their grandparents and probably their great-grandparents probably read this same book when they were kids. Then we talk about what it might have been like 70+ years ago--did people dress the same, did cars look the same, did they have cell phones--you get the idea. We spend some time looking at the illustrations as we discuss this and the kids seem to be fascinated with the idea of a dial-phone (need to find one and bring it in). As we read, we spend some time discussing some of the things in the pictures that might not be familiar to the kids now. Other things that we end up discussing? Why the words say they row out to the big ship when the rowboat looks bigger than the ship (they love pointing out that it only LOOKS small "cuz it's far away"). (I take this opportunity to introduce a new vocabulary word--perspective--with the added bonus of appealing to my visual learners. Then we talk about whether this story is "made up" or "informational" to lead in to reading a non-fiction story. I've been pairing Curious George with Chimpanzees by Helen Frost or Jane Goodall by Jo S. Kittinger.
I gotta say, I'm having fun all over again with this story. Maybe growing up (a little) isn't so bad after all. ;D
