My Best Friend Is As Sharp As a Pencil: And Other Funny Classroom Portraits - Hardcover

Piven, Hanoch

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375853383 ISBN 13: 9780375853388

Publisher: Random House Studio, 2010

Synopsis

Here's the perfect back-to-school gift for budding artists. Like the creator's previous picture book, My Dog Is as Smelly as Dirty Socks, this picture book encourages children to be creative and make their own object portraits. It's a fun activity for home or for the classroom. You can even check out portraits made by other readers in the "kids' gallery" of author Hanoch Piven's Web site, www.pivenworld.com—and while you're at it, send in your own!

Learn how to create a funny librarian, a colorful art teacher, or your best friend by seeing how one girl does it in this simple, playful picture book that's comprised of portraits made of objects. Once the girl has talked about—and drawn—the key figures in her school, she ends with the pièce de résistance—a class portrait!

About this title

About the Author

Hanoch Piven is the illustrator of several children's books, including My Dog Is as Smelly as Dirty Socks; What Presidents Are Made Of, a Child Magazine Best Book, a Parents' Choice Award recipient, and an ABA Kids' Pick of the List; and What Athletes Are Made Of. His work has appeared in a number of publications, including Entertainment Weekly, Rolling Stone, and the New Yorker. Hanoch Piven received a Gold Medal from the Society of Illustrators for his object portrait of Barbra Streisand, which appears on the cover of Faces: 78 Portraits from Madonna to the Pope.

Over the past five years, Hanoch has been giving "drawing with objects" workshops in the United States and abroad. He works in classrooms, hospitals (in art therapy programs), and museums. Learn more about him at www.pivenworld.com.

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
(c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

About this edition

• Publisher: Random House Studio
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0375853383
• ISBN 13: 9780375853388
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 40
• Illustrator: Piven Hanoch