Not a Box........

If you haven't tried this book you are missing out!  I love that the cover feels like cardboard AND that when I read to a group of students they went to class to make a book for the library entitled Not a Shelf Marker.

From the Publisher: A box is just a box . . . unless it's not a box. From mountain to rocket ship, a small rabbit shows that a box will go as far as the imagination allows. Inspired by a memory of sitting in a box on her driveway with her sister, Antoinette Portis captures the thrill when pretend feels so real that it actually becomes real-when the imagination takes over and inside a cardboard box, a child is transported to a world where anything is possible.

Booklist (December 1, 2006 (Vol. 103, No. 7))

Wrapped in basic, grocery-bag-brown paper, this streamlined book visualizes a child's imagined games. "Why are you sitting in a box?"reads the opening page, opposite an image of a small rabbit, drawn in the simplest, unshaded lines, who appears next to a square. "It's not a box,"reads the text, presumably in the rabbit's defiant voice, on the next page, and equally simple red lines overlay the black-lined rabbit and box to show a speeding roadster. In the following spreads, the questioner (a clueless adult?) continues to ask about the rabbit's plans, while the little voice answers with the book's protest of a title. This owes a large debt to Crockett Johnson's Harold and the Purple Crayon (1955). And as in Johnson's classic, the spare, streamlined design and the visual messages about imagination's power will easily draw young children, who will recognize their own flights of fantasy.