When the Fireflies Come

Title: When the Fireflies Come
Author: Jonathan London
Illustrator: Terry Widener
Publisher and date of publication: Dutton Children's Books, 2003
Genre: Realistic Fiction
Age: 1-3

One day during the summer four friends spent the day together. In the morning the children played badminton, hop scotch and other fun games. As the afternoon brought about the hot weather they soon chased after the ice cream truck and treated themselves to ice cream that quickly melted down their hands. Once they were finished they decided to play a game of baseball. This was their favorite game and played it until it was too dark to see anymore. Once it got dark all the kids knew what was next. It was time for the fireflies to come and visit. They quickly ran to their houses and got the jars that they had made to catch the fireflies in. They raced around the field filling their jars as much as they could. When it was time to go inside they all stood together and wondered what they should do with all the fireflies they had caught. One of the friends looked up at the sky and said the stars were calling them. They then opened the lids and released the fireflies into the sky to go and meet with stars. The day had ended as they crawled into bed they knew they would dream of fireflies and baseball.

I could really connect with story. Growing up my family has always lived in the country. I can remember going out to my aunt and uncle's house where my cousins and I would catch fireflies. We each had our own jar with holes in the top so that they would live. However, we were not nearly as fortunate as the children in the story in filling up our jars. We found it quite hard to catch them but we never gave up and always caught a few. I think that this is a story that anybody would enjoy reading whether for scholastic purposes or just for fun. Who doesn't like to reminisce about summer days filled with games and ice cream? I can still hear the repetitive ice-cream truck song playing over and over in my head. I wish they were still around like they used to be. All of the pages in this book contained double-page spreads. They were amazing and the colors were very bold which seemed to capture the greenness of the grass, the blueness of the sky and so forth. The illustrator did a great job at showing the movement through the day from morning to night, by the appearing and disappearing of their shadows. I really enjoyed reading this book. The picture alone tell the story they really needed no words to understand what was going on during this summer day.

As far as classroom use there is two things that come to mind. The first is the topic of fireflies. If I was doing a unit on bugs this would be a great book to use. The characters in the story go into detail about of the bug switches on and off like going from night to day. It explains how they come out at night and things of that sort. I think that using this book would be a great way to introduce this insect, especially for younger kids because there is also that sense of fun and mystery. The book also contained a lot of sounds in the book. To name just a few, the dog barking woof-woof, door slams slam-bang slam-bang, thong-thong of playing badminton and many more. If I were doing a unit on sensory and focusing on sound this book points out some great sounds that children might not think of when you ask them to tell them the sound of something. For kids it is often basic bird chirping, cat meowing. However in this book the use the sound of feet on the ground, the sound of a door slamming and the sound when the baseball hits the wooden bat. After reading this book I would probably assign something along of the lines of sound they hear throughout the day or to go home and see what they can hear and make a list. Then have them come back and discuss it as a class. Not only would it be interesting to see what the students come up with but it would be fun when it came time to share these sounds and hear how people interpret things differently. Even if I wasn't to use this book in my class I would have it available to read because it was such a fun book.