Sun Bread by Elisa Kleven

This is a beautiful book; one of my daughter’s and my all time favorites. The language is so vivid and flowing is wraps the reader in a fluffly cloud of gossimer. It is a perfect text to help your students learn to create mental images and learn to create them in thier own writing. It is a great book to illustrate the beauty of language. The captivating rhyming text makes it a great read aloud. The colorful water color/pen and ink portraits draw you into a fanciful world of animal characters. The story chronicles how a long cold winter effects them. Sound familiar? It tells of a baker, a dog, who misses the sun so much she decides tobake her own. The animal inhabitants of the town smell the bread and are drawn to come and eat. It is so delicious that it causes them to float up to the sky and when they come down again, they sing so beautifully that the real sun wakes up. They throw the sun offerings of the bread and the sun reciprocates by shining down on them and warm their souls. The baker then promises to bake more bread if the sun will return the next day. She stays up all night baking and to her and the other animals’ delight, the sun does return. They now know what to do when it turns cold and the grayness gets to them. The story depicts the joy we feel when the seasons turn from winter to spring or to stretch the analogy even farther when all our toils pay off, when we see the proverbial light at the end of the tunnel. It also alludes to learning benefits of learning strategies to help ourselves out of dark periods.The inside of the back cover sports a great recipe for making sun bread which is absolutely delicious. Great winter project!

Elisa Kleven has written and illustrated many books for children, including the best-selling book Abuela (by Arthur Dorris) and The Paper Princess.