Fairy Trails - By Susan Middleton Elya

Fairy Trails was written by Susan Middleton Elya and illustrated by Mercedes McDonald. It is a fictional story about two young people that travel through a few different fairy tales on their way to their aunt's house. The story is told mostly in English and also has a few Spanish words. The words rhyme and it is pretty apparent what the meaning of the Spanish words are by the context of the story.

For example, the first page states,

"Miguel and Maria, on one summer dia,
left home to go visit their auntie - their tia."

Miguel and Maria find a gingerbread house and escape the brujita (witch) only to find a big, bad wolf. Each page contains a different fairy tale character that they run into, but promptly leave because they need to go see their aunt. They see Cinderella and the 3 bears before arriving at their aunts house. They have a nice meal, comment on their auntie's neighbor, Humpty Dumpty. They get a magic carpet ride home from Aladdin and are tucked into bed.

This book was created for children grades K to 2 and the readability is for ages 4-8. The illustrations are bright and nicely done. I think that children would enjoy the fact that they might recognize the fairy tales that the characters are walking through and decoding some of the Spanish words.

Literary Elements:
Allusion - The book refers to different fairy tales that the reader picks up on.
Personification - A wolf and an egg walk and talk in the story.
Foreshadowing - Maria and Miguel walk down a trail towards what looks like a gingerbread house.

Mini-lesson:
I think a good mini-lesson to go with this book is to show how we can find the meaning of words by the words around them. We use the context of the story to figure out the meaning of words we don't know. In this case, they are Spanish words, but we can use this skill in the same way for English words. We could also discuss the Spanish words in the book and possibly learn some new words.