My Thoughts on the Book, Extra Yarn by Mac Barnett and Illustrated by Jon Klassen

As an educator and an avid reader, I am constantly looking for new and interesting books to read for myself and to my students. Today, it is hard to find quality children's literature. A book that has meaningful text and incredible illustrations. I believe that I have found such a book in Extra Yarn by Mac Barnett and Illustrated by Jon Klassen.

This book, starts off with a simple, almost black and white illustration as the setting is being described. In the beginning of the book, the main character, Annabelle finds a box that is full of yarn. She starts out by knitting a sweater for herself and one for her dog, Mars. The story goes on and follows Annabelle throughout her day, where she ends up knitting sweaters for other children and their pets, her classmates, her teacher, her neighbors, a doctor and his patient, cats, dogs, other animals, and even nonliving things that didn't need sweaters (houses, mailboxes, birdhouses, etc.). Pretty soon, the entire town became filled with colorful yarn, everywhere. Word got out that Annabelle was knitting a lot of things around her town and that she never ran out of yarn. This caused people to come and visit her. An archduke came to see her and offer her a lot of money for her box of yarn, but she declined all of his offers. Upset by this, the archduke hired robbers to steal the box of yarn, but when he got the box, it was completely empty. The archduke tossed it out the window of his castle and it found its way back to Annabelle.

Throughout the story, whenever the yarn has not been used, the pictures are a black, white, and light brown color. Then, as the story continues, and the yarn is used to make sweaters and hats for everybody and everything in the town, we slowly see it come to life with color. When the story moves on to the setting of the archdukes castle, the pictures go back to being black, white, and brown because there is no yarn in the box for him to use. Once the box returns to Annabelle, we see how the town is still filled with colorful yarn.

I really liked this book and I can see why it won the Caldecott Honor Medal. It is a book that I believe has amazing illustrations and story. These two elements work wonderfully to complement each other throughout the reading of the story. There is almost an effortlessness that occurs when seeing the transitions of the pictures from black and white to color as you read the book. This is how a quality children's book should be.