By: Melissa Weir-Pina
Smelly Socks was written by Robert Munsch and illustrated by Michael Martchenko. The book was written for ages three to seven. The theme of the book is wearing clean clother versus dirty clothes, and how wearing clean clothes is much better.
The story is about a girl named Tina, she needs new socks so she goes to a store with her grandfather and there she finds a pair of red, green, and yellow striped socks that she loves, in fact, Tina loves her socks so much that she decides that she is never going to take them off. Naturally, after wearing the socks for more than a few days they become dirty and very smelly, Tina’s mother tries to convince Tina to let her wash the socks, but Tina refuses to take her socks off. At school, Tina’s classmates are getting tired of Tina wearing her smelly socks so they decide that something needs to be done about Tina’s socks, so they grab Tina, bring her to a river and wash her socks in the river, and from then on Tina realized that wearing clean socks was a lot better, and decided that she was going to wear clean socks from then on.
I think Smelly Socks is relevant to a child’s social development because the book is explaining why you shouldn’t be wearing smelly clothes all the time in public, the book so how something like smelly socks can make an environment unpleasant for the people around you, so kids can understand why they can’t just wear one thing all the time without it being cleaned. I also think that Smelly Socks can help with language development, because there are lots of moments in this book (and in a lot of Robert Munsch books) where a parent can encourage their child to pronounce words for them (usually an onomatopoeia). There also words in the book that have been written an exaggerated manner which tells the reader they supposed to pronounce the word in an exaggerated manner, and that is something. the child can get involved with as well.
Before reading the book I would ask the kids if they are familiar with Robert Munsch’s books because Robert Munsch is a fairly well known author, and Michael Martchenko’s illustrations are pretty recognizable as well. I think that even if the kids don’t know the author or illustrator by name, they will at the very least recognize Robert Munsch’s work. For an activity to do with kids after reading the book, they could colour in their own pairs of paper socks, they could use their imagination to design what they think a pair of socks that they would never want to take off would look like.
In conclusion, I think that Smelly Socks is a very good book that’s really fun to read to kids. It takes the simple idea of a girl not wearing socks and turns it into a story that is funny and entertaining for both the young child and the adult reading the book. It’s a very silly story with a simple moral, but most books for young children are like that and those are usually the best books to start young kids with because those simple morals will go a long way to helping children develop skills as they learn and start to interact with the world a little bit more every day.
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