I don't why, I just want to say this. My kid asked how the man with the yellow hat got a monkey to start. He read almost all the Curious George books in the library over the summer. Curious George Gets a Job starts off with George in a zoo, but he escapes. He ends up getting a job washing windows in a high rise. He sees some painters leave for lunch so he paint a mural of a African jungle on the apartment walls. Everybody's so mad they chase him down the fire escape, but he falls and breaks his foot. Of course my kid was sad about the broken foot but he asked me to take over reading. The apartment owner says, "you got what you deserve", (a broken foot?). While in the hospital George drinks something from a blue bottle that gives him wings and makes him fly, then everything goes black, and he passes out. Meanwhile the man with the yellow hat sees in the newspaper that the monkey he knows is in the hospital for a broken foot. So he calls a studio director and makes arrangements to go get George from the hospital and let him star in a movie about his home in the African jungle. He get's to the hospital, George is passed out on the floor, he and the nurse wake George up in a cold shower and then the man in the yellow hat takes him home.
I skipped the page where George drank the medicine, was flying, then went black and fell on the floor. That page was in cursive. I said, we're going to skip this page. It's in cursive.
I was going to ask, I know that sometimes books are supposed to deal with tough themes. I was going to ask for suggestions about how to make good use of reading literature when it has rough themes. Scholastic list this book as comedy and humor- this is just a generalized question that reading the book brought up for me. This following link suggests the moral of that story was "is curiosity a good thing or a bad thing, what are some of the benefits and draw backs?" http://www.homeschoolshare.com/curious_george_takes_a_job.php
I guess these scenes in a children's book shocked me into seeing we're past the learning to read stage and into the reading for the story stage.
