I must confess that I use Yahoo! for most of my web searches and that may be why I didn’t know Google for Educators existed but I thought I’d give it a try to complete an online grad class assignment. I don’t like to waste my time with idle work when I do something for a grad class and hoped I could find something to use in the classroom so I started exploring. I nerdily checked out the purpose of the site then Tools for your classroom and moved to the Google for Educators Book Search.

I’m pretty good with search engines and had been trying to find the text and illustrations from Maurice Sendak’s Chicken Soup with Rice online. I had used the months of January and February for a poetry lesson with my second graders as we work together on reading fluently. As I explored their background knowledge I found that few of them had actually ever consumed chicken soup with rice and that none of them were familiar with the book. I remember the book as part of my childhood and my wife and older children have even memorized the poems for each month (I even had the kids in my classroom memorize the February poem to recite for Mrs. N. when she visited us one day). Unfortunately I had not been able to locate both the text and illustrations in my previous searches and therefore had the library copy of the book in my teacher bag to scan the pages at home. I planned to show the pages on the “big screen” using our media cart and do a group reading of the full poem with the class. I then hoped to make up for their lack of prior experience by making a very basic chicken soup with rice in the classroom and serving it in Dixie cups as part of our snack that very same day.

My latest search found several links for Sendak’s book and I checked out a few of them but none were exactly what my somewhat obsessive self wanted. I tried the Advanced Search link adding the author and “my snowman’s anniversary” to narrow my results and retrieve the full poem. Though not completely successful I came across a portion of the text of Really Rosie, a musical collaboration of Sendak and Carole King. Pretty neat I thought. Maybe something I could use if I ever directed an elementary school play or taught fifth or sixth grade. I could write this up for my grad class and be home free.

Did I mention I was somewhat obsessive? Seeing the musical reminded me that I had seen links to Carole King’s song “Chicken Soup with Rice” in my previous attempts but I had never heard it. So another search, this time in my old friend Yahoo!, for “chicken soup with rice Carole King” (I won’t tell you that I spelled Carole wrong the first time and had to correct it before letting myself more forward). I clicked on the first YouTube video I saw, a link to a cartoon version of Really Rosie, cranked the speakers on the laptop and listened for the first time.

Again, pretty cool, maybe even something the kids could learn and sing along to. It would probably help them to memorize  his classic. Out of the corner of my eye though, in the list of Related Videos, a 1×1 cm image caught my attention. Here was Maurice Sendak’s illustration for July with text beside it! I quickly clicked over and found myself listening to the entire poem sung by Carole King as I followed along with all the words in this book-like format.

Then I turned down the volume and read aloud. My seventeen-year-old daughter walked into the room and immediately shrieked, “Hey, that’s Chicken Soup with Rice!” Excited, I shared my realized lesson plans with her to which she responded, “Can I have you as a teacher?”

I’ll need to confirm the link isn’t blocked at school by my district’s filtering software on Monday but if any of my kids are reading, get ready for some chicken soup with rice next week Tuesday when I lead our poetry lesson once again.