Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge

A: Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge

B: Mem Fox

C: Julie Vivas

D:(Originally by Omnibus Books in 1984)

E: Fiction and life/Picture Book

F:  Younger Elementary School

This is such a fetching little book.  It is all about a small boy named Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge.  He has four names and his favorite person in the world is an old lady who just happens to have four names as well, Miss Nancy Alison Delacourt.  He lived next to the "old persons home" and so he was always over there and he knew every last one of them. There are many different types of older people in the home and they all do different things with Wilfrid Gordon but in accordance with above Miss Nancy is his favorite and he tells her all of his secrets.  One day his parents are talking about Miss Nancy and said that she was losing her memory, well Wilfrid Gordon did not understand the concept of memory so he set off to find out what it meant.  He talked to all of the people at the home and each person gave a different answer on what they thought was memory.  So then Wilfrid Gordon goes home and he starts looking for memories of his own to give to Miss Nancy, he gets sea shells, a puppet, a medal from his grandfather, his football, and a warm egg from under a hen.  He brings Miss Nancy his basket of memories and she starts to remember some of her own and then she remembers all of the secrets that she and Wilfrid Gordon had told each other. It ends here on a happy note, "Miss Nancy's memory had be found again".

The illustrations in this book mirror and follow the text very well.  I am not quite sure what the medium that was used is but I think that there has to be some watercolors in there with maybe pen or pencil.  The majority of the book had single page images while there were a couple of double page spreads.  Even without the pictures I think that the text of this book could hold your attention fairly well, it is just a cute little story about a small boy and his friend who happens to be much older than him.  The Images in this book are very realistic and charming.  the only thing about the pictures that would be false is some of the proportions of the older people.  Which I thought was really cute because that is probably how he felt when he was standing next to those tall men and women.

This could be used to help talk to children about older people and how we should treat them just the same as everyone else.  To be respectful to those who are older than us.  Also talking about curiosity would be something to discussed and I bet it would find some interesting conversations with in that context.  You could ask the students to think or maybe write down something that they are curious about and then you could talk about them in class and see if the answers could be found, which could integrate the internet into a class activity.  A safety talk could be appropriate there if it had not been done yet or in a while.  You could possibly talk about how you need to be careful of strangers and it is generally not ok to just go into the home and start talking with the residences. Those are just a few of what could be done with this book.