Aunt Chip and the Great Triple Creek Dam Affair

By Patricia Polacco

This book was amazing!  The story is about people in a town who watch tv all the time.  They don't know how to read or what books are even really for.  All they do all day is watch tv, the kids don't play outside there is no talking or laughing with neighbors just people watching tv. Fifty years earlier the library was knocked down and a huge tv tower was built.  Charlotte the towns librarian said there would be consequences and she took to her bed.  For fifty years no one read a book and they were used for all sorts of odd things.  They held up houses filled in potholes, and were even turned into a dam.  That is until Eli finds out from his Aunt Charlotte (Chip) what books are.  She teaches him how to read and then all the children in the town want to read.  Eventually, everyone in the town sees how important books are and that they need them.  Eli pulled the book Moby Dick out of a huge pile and the dam broke and the water flooded through.  The tv tower came crashing down and the townspeople were furious.  That is until the children and Aunt Chip made them see the importance of books.  The children taught their parents and grandparents how to read.  While I was reading this I thought about how technology is taking the place of books.  While not to the extreme of this book, books are beginning to become obsolete.  I realized how many books I read on my iPad instead of reading the actual book.  TVs, computers, gaming consoles, and tablets are becoming the new thing and books are slowly disappearing.  The illustrations in this book were great.  They really told a story, when the townspeople were only watching tv, the town was gray and the buildings were rundown and falling apart.  Once books came back into the picture the town was colorful and the houses and buildings were repaired.

This would be a great book to show that books are very important.  The students will see that yes technology is available and it may be ok to watch a little tv, but books provide so much to people everyday.  There are so may stories and ways to open the imagination when reading books and other types of literature.    This book is a great way to show that and have the students create a story and write about how they think life would be without knowing how to read and not having books available to them.