Silver Pony

___________________
by Lynd Ward. Picture Book. 174 pages. Grades 2-7.
Find this book: Amazon

Review

Originally published in 1973, this is an early wordless novel of a boy and a flying horse. It has everything you'd expect in a novel: plot, characters, and chapters. A winged pony appears to a young boy and takes him off on a series of adventures according to the directions indicated on a weather vane. When they go too high, however, disaster results. The illustrations tell the tale of sacrifice and adventure. This is a beautiful, mythic novel.

This wonderful story has strong literary allusions to the stories of Pegasus and Icarus.

(Continued Below)

Things to Talk About and Notice

Do you think the people on the ground see the boy and the pony or just the things they drop?

Activities

Standard: Language Arts, Writing, Editing, Self-Correcting
Read the book taking notes about the various things that you see happening. Share your notes with the group and work together to make a single written narrative of the story. Type the story into a computer and print it out in large print. Display the pages on a bulletin board or wall in the correct sequence.
Supply red pencils and ask everyone except faculty members to make spelling or composition corrections. After a week or so, retype the pages making the indicated corrections and display the pages again. Ask everyone to do the same error search and corrections. Retype again if necessary. When you are convinced that there are absolutely no errors of any sort, ask the teacher in the school who is the best at finding such errors to red pencil any that still exist. Did you miss any? Can you figure out why?