When I first read Norah Dooley‘s Everybody Cooks Rice, I encountered something larger than a neighborhood making some sort of rice for dinner. Rather, I found people from different ethnicities who were working hard to put dinner on the table at the end of the day. Sounds like a typical American thing to do, right? In one house, there are grandparents cooking black-eyed peas and rice for their grandchildren. In another home, a teenage girl and her brothers are making rice and pigeon peas for dinner since their mother is working late. Finally, in another house the mom is making rice for her family and for the boarder who lives in the back room. Page-after-page in this text, as Carrie, the main character, searches for her brother Anthony who is late for dinner (again), we are able to peek into the nighttime rituals of many different working class families.
As I perused this book again yesterday, I recalled a week-long class I took in 2006 with Lester Laminack. The class was about picture book writing. Laminack told us many of the best ways to get a picture book published, as an adult author, was to write about a universal theme. Hence, when our students are strapped for ideas to write about in a personal narrative unit of study, having them think about universal themes can be helpful. Hence, using Everybody Cooks Rice as a mentor is way to assist a student who is struggling to find a meaningful topic to write about since the book explores the realities of everyday life and then makes more out of it by using a variety of other crafting techniques.
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