She's an educator who hasn’t quite figured out how to escape the Sunshine State and is surviving and thriving within its alligator-infested clutches with her husband and three sons.

What are your favorite childhood books? What messages did you learn from them? Do they still have the same impact as when you first read them? Satisfaction will come to those who please themselves.Įven decades later I love reading Lobel’s books and I’m happy to share these moments with my sons and you, dear reader. There can be no doubt that I am a splendid dancer. “How very wrong they are!” said the camel. You are not and never will be a ballet dancer!”Ĭhuckling and laughing, the audience moved away across the sand. You are, like the rest of us, simply a camel. “I must tell you frankly,” said a member of the audience, “as a critic and a spokesman for this group, that you are lumpy and humpy. When her dance was over, she made a deep bow. Here’s an excerpt that induces laughter and empathetic tears from my middle son and I:Īt last the Camel said, “Now I am a dancer.” She announced a recital and danced before an invited group of camel friends and critics. Her dedication is inspiring and endearing.

The Camel, who has her heart set on becoming a ballet dancer practices her “pirouettes” and as she works for long months under the hot desert sun, she never gives up! Even when her feet are described as “blistered” and her body aches with fatigue, not once does she “think of stopping”.

One of my favorites is “The Camel Dances”. I often read Fables to my own children, which contains twenty original fables with fresh and surprising morals. He was so savage that he prepared and drank a proper cup of his own tears in the chapter called Tear-Water Tea! You can’t make this stuff up. Owl was so innovative that he was sipping tears before it was a fashionable expression of throwing shade. Here’s an old favorite that my mother and I loved reading and re-reading: So, I guess it was inevitable that I’d be a big fan of Lobel’s award-winning work. As a child, I was a voracious reader and a Master Bedtime Story Demander (thanks, Mom!) that I grew up to be a former elementary school teacher (2 nd, 4 th, and 5 th grade) and present-day middle school reading teacher. In 1980, his book FABLES, had won the Caldecott Medal as the best illustrated book. Arnold Lobel’s illustrations have always been charming and the stories centered on anthropomorphic animal characters consistently possessed a quirky kind of wonderful.

Fables lobel book