What happens when you lose a tooth?

 

 

There is one thing that all students will have in common throughout their early childhood school years.  This one thing is losing teeth!  As teachers, we may also need to be dentist.  We will wiggle teeth, pull teeth or just clap and look at the snaggle toothed child smiling back at us.  Since this is a subject that all kids will experience, why not bring it into the library of our classroom?

 

This book is "Tooth Fairy" By: Audrey Wood.  It is fantasy fiction, but also a picture book.  Fairies are not realistic, but they capture the imagination of children.  The pictures in this book are beautiful! The book takes the myth of the Tooth Fairy to a higher level by taking the reader on a journey to the Tooth Fairy's palace, which happens to be made of teeth.

 

The book begins with a little boy, Matthew, losing a tooth.  He calls for his mother and shouts excitedly about losing his tooth.  He wakes his sister!  Unfortunately, the sister gets very jealous and wants to lose a tooth of her own. The mother jumps in bed with Matthew and begins to tell him the story of the Tooth Fairy.  After the story, she tucks them back in and returns to bed.  After everyone is asleep, the sister Jessica, sneaks out of bed into the kitchen and finds a kernel of corn.  She paints the corn white to make it look like a real tooth.  She returns to the bedroom and places it under her pillow to try to trick the Tooth Fairy.  During the night, the children wake up to find out they have shrunk and the Tooth Fairy is in their house.  She takes them away to her palace.  There are bridges and towers all made of teeth.  They finally come to the hall of perfect teeth. Matthew is able to place his tooth here but Jessica has to take her tooth to get some work done on it.  The dirty teeth have to go to the tooth dungeon.  Robots take the tooth to clean it and all of the alarms start going off!  The children run because they have tricked the robots and they are mad!  They slide down a big slide right back into their bedroom.  The next morning, Matthew wakes up to find the Tooth Fairy has left him an apple.  He offers Jessica a bite.  She bites the apple and it knocks her tooth loose!  She is so excited and tells her mother that her tooth will be placed in the hall of perfect teeth. 

 

A strategy I would use in my future classroom with this book is the email and chat rooms for book talk.  I would love to get involved with a classroom teacher from another country that also speaks English.  Students from my classroom could email students from that classroom to discuss books.  For this particular book, the students could discuss whether or not the Tooth Fairy visits their country when they lose a tooth.  Once again, even the children there will be loosing teeth!  It will be interesting to see if the traditions there are the same traditions that we have here in the United States.  We could keep in contact and have a book list that we follow and continue discussions about multiple books.  The opinion on books will be different because of the difference in our experiences.  I look forward to bringing this idea to my future classroom.