by Clearly Ambiquous www.flickr.com
*Picture book for preschoolers through second graders
*Two young boys as main characters
*Rating: I am in love with Let’s Do Nothing! I laughed out loud at this picture book. Tony Fucile’s illustrations are hilarious, and the story is so cute!
Short, short summary: Frankie and Sal do not know what else to do with themselves. They have “played every sport ever invented, painted more pictures than Van Gogh, and baked enough cookies to feed a small country.” So, they decide to do nothing. But did you know that doing nothing is much harder than it seems? When Frankie tries to be as still as can be and imagine the things that Sal says to imagine, he just can’t do nothing. Even through Sal’s frustration, he still realizes that they have proved a very important point that the whole world should realize!
So, what do I do with this book?
1. Ask students what they would pretend to be if they had to sit still and do nothing. In the book, the boys pretend to be statues, trees, and buildings. You can do this as a shared writing activity for younger students, where you make a list on chart paper and each child comes up with an idea to illustrate. For older primary children who are reading Let’s Do Nothing!, you can ask them to write about this prompt in their reading response journals.
2. Is it impossible to do nothing? That’s what the boys say in the book. Ask children this question and brainstorm answers. You can even work this into a health lesson. What parts of the body are still working and moving when you are doing nothing? How about when you are sleeping? Why do these particular body systems continue to work even when you are doing nothing?
3. Ask children to tell you what they like to do when they are bored. Have they ever run into the same problem as Frankie and Sal in the book? How would they solve this problem? Help children to make a personal connection to the text. When students or your children make personal connections with Tony Fucile’s text, then they are improving their reading comprehension, which is a very important skill.
Have you read Let’s Do Nothing! with your class or your children? What did you think?
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