Willy The Champ

So for the 2nd week of class we were assigned to do our picture books and novel that was based on a serious, and I decided that I would try to read some books from a series that I’ve never read before. That X'd out many choices, however, I stumbled upon the “Willy” series books. The name kind of sounded familiar to me-I think perhaps my brother used to read them when he was younger. Anyway, looking through a few books, I noticed they are at the beginning reading level, and that’s around the grade I want to teach, so I checked out some of the books from the series.
Willy the Champ By Anthony Browne was definitely a happy read. The book starts off with Willy being down on himself and showing how he’s not good at too many activities and gets made fun of a lot. Luckily, when a bully tries to punch Willy, Willy moves his head and the bully accident ends up hitting the wall and hurting himself, and Willy “was the champ.”
There was something about its flow that I did not like too much in this book. For example, the first few pages are Willy doing various activities, and after each activity, on the next page would read “He did try”. So, you kind of get into this pattern that the books going to go in, then it just randomly stops the pattern and is a little difficult, perhaps for a 1st grader, to understand.
I really liked the pictures though. The Illustrator did a great job emphasizing how much bigger all the characters were than Willy. In addition, I liked how he would have a statement on one page, then the reader turns to the next page and sees the activity happening (with no text on the page)