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REMATCH: The Tortoise & The Hare

 

Teachers! Click on the Textual Storytelling and Visual Storytelling buttons below for lesson guidelines

       One day I was out for a run and found myself lamenting the fact that I had been writing on the side for 20 years without getting any of my half-dozen books, in various genres, published, or any of my dozen screenplays produced. I thought about friends who had plugged along in the same job or line of work for decades making money but not following their dreams, and how they had progressed seemingly without taking the risks I had. I didn’t begrudge my friends their success, I just despaired that my endless efforts had failed to pay off. As I gasped for air (the run is really hilly) I thought of my friends as turtles in the old Aesop’s fable of the Tortoise and the Hare, plodding along…and at that moment reimagined the hare not as cocky and lazy but as a risk-taker. A children’s story unfolded quite readily in thought: the offspring of the original losing hare in the Aesop's fable decides to restore his family’s name by winning a rematch of the “Great Race.” (The reader will see how I created circumstances that called for a rematch.) Because our hare-hero Taz is so heavily favored, he decides to employ his Rube Goldberg gadget-making skills to break the course record, which will ensure he restores his family’s name. At first I had Taz winning the race outright, but of course that undermines the lesson of the original story, which I did not want to do. Both the tortoise in the original fable, and my friends that plodded along in the same job their whole career, deserve a reward. The lesson I want to teach kids is that proper risk-taking is rewarded with greater success. I’m pleased with the ending I was able to conjure that achieves my twin goals. I hope readers agree. 

 

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My enduring gratitude to Kayleigh Mayes Ebenrick for her tireless work on the illustrations for Rematch.

TEACHERS - The buttons above lead you to two FREE Discussion Guides related to Rematch. Consider them in the public domain. The idea is to read Rematch to your students and then use the Discussion Guides to talk about storytelling—both text and pictures. I was very conscious of incorporating widely accepted storytelling principles into Rematch. I have a prejudice against children’s picture books that seem to be little more than pretty pictures with captions. Rematch is fairly complex for a picture book, but it’s meant to be that way: I think we underestimate the ability of 4-8-year-olds to comprehend storytelling—or at least intuit it. At the same time, I worked very closely with illustrator Kayleigh Mayes Ebenrick to create illustrations that closely match the text—that tell the story through the illustrations, either substituting imagery for text or having the imagery complement the text. That is standard, of course, for a picture book, but Rematch began life as a 90-page novella, so a lot of text had to be “offloaded” to imagery. It taught me valuable lessons about visual storytelling I thought would be fun to share with kids. Thus there are two separate Discussion Guides. I think of both as early childhood education in the realm of media literacy, a crucial (and increasingly so) lifelong skill. 

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