Just One More Swim
Written and illustrated by: Caroline Pitcher and Jenny Jones
Parragon Books Ltd, 2008
24 Pages
Trying something new can be incredibly daunting. Whether it be trying a new food, going to a new place, or like the young cubs in this story, taking that leap of faith and diving straight into the water. The mother of these two cubs is an excellent swimmer and they watch her gracefully make her way around the ocean with ease. But when the mother bear asks her cubs to join, neither of them want to budge. With a little encouragement from some other friendly artic animals and some motherly love, will the cubs finally take their first swim?
Jones uses calm strokes for this book that make Pitcher's words float delicately off the page. I love that the paint used overlaps each other with dots and swirls instead of straight flat lines. The cool colors capture the artic chills perfectly. Every animal in the story is unique, even the polar bears have their own personalities. These illustrations are exactly what I would imagine if I heard the story out loud.
I would use this story to encourage students of any age to try new things. I would have them write about something daring they would like to try and what it would take to achieve this adventure. This would be an excellent book to use when teaching a science lesson about the polar bears. This book illustrates some different behaviors of the bears and shows some foods the bears like to eat, like blueberries! This book would also be a good book to use when teaching a geography lesson about the arctic. Not only does this book tell of the polar bears lives, but it also shows several other types of animals that can be found in and around the icy arctic. Several of the words in this book are not words that children would typically use or even hear, such as thrashed and aquamarine. This would be a good opportunity for a language lesson. Using dictionaries, the students could figure out the meanings of the words they haven't heard before.
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