My Lucky Day

by

Keiko Kasza

If you loved The Wolf’s Chicken Stew and The Pigs’ Picnic, you’re going to love the latest Keiko Kasza book, My Lucky Day, too. The story and the illustrations work together to create a wonderful "trickster" story.

As the book opens, a hungry fox is preparing to hunt for his dinner, only to be interrupted by a knock on the door. A voice calls out, "Hey, Rabbit!"

The look on the fox’s face is priceless and perfectly matches his thoughts. "Rabbit?...If there were any rabbits in here, I’d have eaten them for breakfast."

Fox opens his door and discovers . . . dinner on the doorstep! Now it’s the pig’s face which is totally expressive of his instant realization of the danger he is courting. Immediately, fox grabs pig and brings him in for dinner. "This must be my lucky day!" the fox shouts.

As the story moves on, pig offers continual suggestions for how fox can make him, pig, into a more delectable dinner. Fox follows each suggestion, growing more and more exhausted, until he passes out, exhausted. At this point, of course, the pig moves on, safely evading the dinner pot.

I won’t spoil the surprise ending, but you and your students can’t help but enjoy the tricks pig has played on fox.

Trait Connections: Word Choice, Organization, Voice

Comprehension Strategy Links

Prediction

  1. I shared the title of the book, and I gave them an example of some things that would make my day lucky, e.g. being able to sleep until noon or finding $100 to spend at the fabric store. Next, I gave students 20 seconds to think about what would make a day lucky for them, and asked them to pair-share ideas in one minute, 30 seconds each.
  2. Before I read the story to my second graders, I asked them to examine the cover picture carefully. It shows both the fox and the pig, looking rather cheerful. I asked them to predict whose lucky day it was.
  3. Next, I asked them to pay close attention to the details in the story to see if they needed to change their predictions, and to keep track of what page, and where on the page, the changes were made. I set them up to think about their thinking.
  4. Most of them began by predicting that it was fox’s lucky day. The fact that they quickly began to change that prediction is an indicator of how many trickster stories I’ve shared with them over the last year-and-a-half! They are wise to this sub-genre. Some were more stubborn than others, but it took less than half the book to convince most of them that the pig was the lucky one.
  5. Make a bar graph of which page convinced the children to change their predictions. (Math connection)

 

Writing

  1. Students could use the title of the book as a title of their own story about a lucky day, the one they shared at the beginning, or perhaps another lucky day.
  2. Students could use the final page of the book to write a sequel to this story.
  3. Students could write the story from the fox’s point of view.
  4. Note: I would read several stories and an opposing version as examples of this kind of writing, before suggesting it to the students. Example: The Three Pigs/The True Story of the Three Pigs

  5. Students could write a story titled "The Unlucky Day."