When Stella Was Very, Very Small by Marie-Louise Gay

When Stella was Very, Very Small by Marie-Louise Gay is another new book to the curriculum lab that I decided to read for this week. It was a nice book, and there were some things I really liked. I had higher expectations for this book, and they were met.

When Stella was small, her whole world was an adventure. Her bath tub was a pool, her backyard was a jungle and dessert, the animals were huge, and she thought she was a goldfish and a turtle. However, once she got older, this was not the case. She realized that the ants in a book were really words that told stories, the bugs in her backyard was tiny, and she can teach her little brother new things. This story line made me smile frequently. When I was younger, I used to pretend the same things that Stella did when she was small. I also really liked how the ordinary things in her life were made extraordinary by her imagination and her age.

The pictures representing Stella's views of her life were fantastic. The colors and details on some pages were fantastic. However, some pages had a little more white space than I would like. The pictures in this book are necessary because they complete the story. "But she could race against her rubber ducks in the enormous Olympic-sized pool" is one example. Without the picture, readers may not know that her "pool" is really a bathtub. This is the case for numerous pictures in the book.

When Stella Was Very, Very Small is a book that I really liked. It was very creative and captured the way that many small children feel when they are younger. The little things seem so huge and imaginations can make anything possible. The pictures really kept the readers involved because they were key in understand the story. I have been pleasantly surprised with the new books I have read this week, and I am looking forward to doing that more often.