Book of the Day: My Best Friend is as Sharp as a Pencil

My Best Friend Is As Sharp As a Pencil by Hanoch Piven


My rating: 5 of 5 stars


How would you describe your best friend, your teachers, yourself, how about characters from a book? This is a great introduction into metaphors and thinking outside the box to describe someone. It would be a great idea to use this concept at the beginning of the school year to get to know other staff members or allow the students to describe themselves to each other. Check back for some examples of Character Portraits from our Bledsoe Book Clubs.

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From School Library Journal

Grade 2–4—When a girl's grandmother comes to visit, she is filled with questions about the child's teachers, friends, and school. Instead of simply answering, the girl decides to show her grandmother what she likes about the important people in her life. She gathers up piles of objects and then sorts through them to find representative objects and collages them into portraits. The girl's friend Jack, who is geographically inclined and "sharp as a pencil," ends up having globes for eyes, magnifying glasses for glasses, a microscope nose, and a pencil mouth. Her art teacher has an artist's palette for a face, wears mysterious dark glasses, sports a colorful Mohawk, and wields a paintbrush. The layout encourages a guessing game of sorts as the audience will wonder how and where each object will be incorporated in the portrait. This book is ideal for projects involving descriptive language. Readers can create their own portraits of friends and teachers using various objects and this book as a guide. Use it with Piven's What Presidents Are Made of (2004), What Athletes Are Made of (2006, both S & S), and My Dog Is as Smelly as Dirty Socks (Randon, 2007) for classroom or crafting activities.—Stacy Dillon, LREI, New York City
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