Monkey Business Book

"Monkey Business: Stories From Around the World" by Shirley Climo is collection of folktales regarding monkeys. The book contains tales from the Americas, Asia, and Africa, and there are also fables and proverbs within the book as well. In the table of contents the stories are broken up into categories by the continents they came from, and within the categories they are further broken up into the different countries. Each story has beautiful illustrations that go along with them. This was a WOW book for me because it was something I had never seen before. I had never really thought about the prevalence of monkeys in fables or folktales, so seeing the collection of stories about monkeys from all over the world was really interesting.
I think that this book would be great in any grade 3-6. Since there are so many stories in the book, you can choose different ones to fit different ages or reading levels. This would be a fun book to teach visualization with since there is so much descriptive language in the stories. I would do a read aloud of a story and have students illustrate it based upon the language used. I also think that this would be a good book to teach themes with, as each of the stories has a theme. A read aloud can also be done and students can come up with the theme.