Annie's Plan

Written by Kraus, Jeanne & Illustrated by Beyl, Charles. Annie’s Plan: Taking Charge of Schoolwork and Homework. Washington, D.C.: Magination Press, 2007.

Written to help struggling students can control in their academic careers, Annie’s Plan is a picture book that helps a young girl create plans to help her get organized in school and at home.

The first half of the book revolves around showing the frustration and struggle Annie has in school. Her parents and teacher also take note of her troubles. They decide to intervene and create a plan to help Annie gain better control in school and at home. There is a 10-step plan for Annie to do at school and a 10-step plan set in place for at home.

At first glance, this book seems like a great idea to help a struggling student (it is not written in the text, but one could guess Annie has ADHD) gain control. However, once you take a closer look at this text, I believe it has a few issues. First off, it offers a quick fix solution to help Annie get back on track. In the ‘real world’ this is not reality and creating a plan is not an overnight fix. Also, this plan will not work for every student, it is not ideal for every student who is struggling in school and is very generalized. I think that Jeanne Kraus had good intentions in writing this book and offered some good suggestions for students to get organized. The article, “Teaching Students About Learning Disabilities Through Children’s Literature” by Prater, Dyches, and Johnstun, gave quite a few suggestions on how to determine if the piece of literature is quality. One aspect it talked about was the portrayal of the character with the Learning Disability. In this book, at first Annie is portrayed in a negative light, she is constantly reminded by her teacher to do better. However, in the second half of the book, once Annie begins using her plans, she becomes a positive portrayal of someone with a learning disability who can be successful in school.

I found a lot of information about Jeanne Kraus on her personal website (http://www.jeannekraus.com/index.htm). I learned that she is a teacher and has a son who has ADHD.