Title: The Way to Start A Day
Author: Byrd Baylor
Illustrator: Peter Parnall
Publication/ Year: Aladdin Paperbacks, 1977
Number of Pages: 27
Tags/ Themes: Award Book, Culture, Historical Fiction, Picture Book, Poetry, K-5
Genre: Non-Fiction
Descriptive Annotation: This book received a Caldecott Honor Award for its stunning simplistic illustrations. This book describes the best way to start off your day, by greeting the sunrise. Every illustration is of a different culture and how they greeted the start of a day, but all the illustrations are in simple line drawings with vivid colors to accentuate them. The story talks about cavemen, Peruvian, Mexican, Egyptian, Conga, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and many other traditions of people and how their cultures welcome the dawn of a new day. Students may need to know a little bit about some of the cultures or at least have an understanding of how many different cultures there are around the world.
Classroom Application: This book would be really good to use to help inform students that everyone will have different traditions and cultures and that is okay! Because even though cultures are very varied and unique, they all share some similarities if you look hard enough. We are all people under the same sun, and it is important to acknowledge and respect other cultures as different from your own, but still special and wonderful! It could meet some social and emotional learning standards by talking about different cultures which may relate to some of my students’ cultures, which may not get represented in books that much. I would use this book to start a conversation between people. How do you start your day? Is there anything special you do at the start of any day? What about your grandparents? We could turn it into a writing prompt as well by reflecting about what cultures you’ve witnessed and what you participate in.
Linguistic and Cultural Diversity Analysis: The language in this book is beautiful. It is very poetic, with phrases such as,
“And everywhere
They knew
To turn
Their faces
Eastward
As the sun
Came up.”
This style is consistent throughout the book, adding pauses and beauty to the language that we don’t usually see in these books. There are many different cultures represented in this book, as I have mentioned, which is very good because it is important to expose young readers to books with a lot of diversity in them. The way the book is written provokes a calming tone to the reader, soothing and relaxing, almost meditative in a way. This is also important because it associates that calm and relaxed emotion with different cultures.
Illustration
