Jumanji

By: Chris Van Allsburg (1981)

This book tells the story of two children that find a board game in a park and decide to play it while their parents are away. This game turns out to be a game unlike any other that they have ever played in that it comes to life as they begin to play it. Their house is eventually filled with monkeys, lions, and snakes that will not go away until someone finishes the game and yells "Jumanji!!!". The children eventually finish the game just before their parents come home and the house amazingly looks just like it did when their parents left.

I thought that this book told a really interesting and descriptive story that really immersed the reader into the crazy game that the children were playing. The pictures in the book were very well done and tended to be so detailed that they looked more like photographs then drawings. This was a book that I could definitely see reading again to my students because of the suspenseful story and great illustrations.

As a teacher I think that this book would be very popular in the classroom because of the great story and the imagination required to follow it. Children have great imaginations and I think that they would find themselves lost in a story like this. To go along with this story I think that I would have students create their own board games with different activities that had to be performed at different stages of the game. These activities could include math, science, or language arts tasks that helped students practice different skills.