About book Balloons Over Broadway: The True Story Of The Puppeteer Of Macy's Parade (2011)
This is the true story of how the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade came to be. This is a biography. As a little boy, Tony Sarg loved to figure out how things moved. One day he created a way to feed the chickens without even moving from his bed! When Tony was all grown up he moved to London and started making puppets and eventually marionettes that actually moved. He moved to New York and his marionettes actually appeared on Broadway. The department store, Macy's, heard about Tony Sarg and his moving puppets and wanted him to design moving characters for their store display window. Macy's decided they wanted a parade to celebrate the many different cultures of the employees that worked for the department store, so they put Tony Sarg in charge of coming up with figures for the parade. After the first successful parade, Macy's decided to have a parade every Thanksgiving to celebrate America's own unique holiday. Each year the parade got bigger and better and eventually Tony came up with huge balloon puppets so that everyone could see what was going on in the parade. I think this book would be good to use if discussing Thanksgiving. While it does not deal with the Native Americans and how Thanksgiving came to be; it is a very big part of every Thanksgiving holiday. I am sure that many, if not all of the students will know or have heard of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. I think it would be good to discuss because it is a tradition of America's to celebrate our unique holiday. I also think the book would be good to have for students to look at because the illustrations are fantastic. There are so many different types of images, from watercolors to collages to crayons. Sweet, M. (2011). Balloons Over Broadway: The True Story of the Puppeteer of Macy’s Parade. New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.ChoiceInternational Reading Association: 2012 Teachers’ ChoicesWatching the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade has been a tradition for me and many Americans for as long as I can remember, so I thoroughly enjoyed reading this book and learning more about this American tradition! The author did a fantastic job of telling us how the Macy’s Day came to be and how it developed in its earliest years. I also enjoyed the cartoonish illustrations that depicted the parade and city streets, and the illustrations that demonstrated the puppeteer’s workspace were very interesting because these pages looked like collaged materials that would be in a puppeteer’s actual workspace. I think this book is perfect for students in grades 3-5 because there is a great deal of text on some pages, and the vocabulary may be out of reach for younger kids. This book could be used as a model for descriptive vocabulary, and it could be used to teach students about cause and effect because the puppeteer had to solve problems with the parade throughout the story.
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Great story, great history. A good one for the day before or day of Thanksgiving!
—Mich
Delightful nonfiction -- in words and pictures!
—kislofff
