How are you Peeling - Foods with Moods

Biographical info: Title: How Are You Peeling - Foods with Moods.
Author/Illustrator: Saxton Freymann and Joost Elffers
Publisher: Scholastic Press.
Year: 1999
Genre: Picture book

Summary: "How Are You Peeling" takes a close look at all the human feelings such as anger, frustration, sadness, shyness, and more. Each page displays a few emotions. These feelings are creatively shown by sculptured vegetables. Tomatoes, bell peppers, oranges, lemons, cantaloupe, and other fruits and vegetables show off their smiles, frowns, sad faces, angry faces, among many other faces. Something else to notice about this book is when read aloud, it has a wonderful rhythm to it.

Theme: Facial expressions can tell you a lot about how someone is feeling. Facial expressions provide great clues to what a person is thinking.

Illustration: The illustration in this book were sculptured vegetables and fruit. According to the back page of the book, markets all over New York metropolitan area "were plumbed for expressive produce..." The expressions were carved on the foods with an Exacto knife. Black eyed peas were used as eyes for the fruits and vegetables. Beet-juice coloring was used for the formations of the mouths. The foods were photographed against plain colored background to convey the moods. My favorite picture is of the turtle and friend. The turtle has a cantaloupe shell, and a bell pepper head.

My two cents: I always looked as vegetables and fruits as just that... vegetables and fruits. Yes, foods do have moods! Children will have fun creating these moods on their veggies. This is one of the most creative and original book I have come across. This book is a wonderful way to teach children how to look at feelings through facial expressions.

Literature Extension Activities:
Idea 1: Each child will get a vegetable and with black eyed peas and strips of flexible paper (preferably material like Styrofoam. The children will make a face showing how they feel on the vegetable. A wonderful activity to do with your child at home.

Idea 2: Divide your kids into groups of 2. Have them sit Indian style, face to face. One partner will make a face (they can pick, either angry, sad, silly, scared, etc.) and the other partner will guess what the other partner is feeling.