ABSTRACT
In a Winnie the Pooh story Rabbit says, “Owl … you and I have brains. The others have fluff.” 1 In reality, the way to the brain is Pooh. The Bear of Very Little Brain and his companions show us how to laugh at ourselves, ridding us of some of the prideful fluff that keeps us from thinking straight. Who among us can ever forget the books read to us by teachers, transporting us to other times and worlds? We forget some of the movies we see, but not the books read to us. In a sense we become the characters in the stories: Robin Hood, Amos Fortune, Charlotte and Wilbur, Johnny Tremaine, James and his giant peach, the children of Auschwitz and their paintings and poetry, “the boy” in Sounder, Harriet Tubman, the Athenians and the Spartans, Anne of Green Gables.
