How Cold Was It?

Sylvia Pantaleo is an assistant professor of education specializing in
children’s literature at Queen’s University and the co-author of
Learning with Literature in the Canadian Elementary Classroom.

As a young boy awakens on a cold winter morning, he asks, “How cold
was it?” The answer: “It was a freezing, sneezing, goose-bumpy,
teeth-chattering, can’t-get-out-of-bed, blankets-over-my-head kind of
cold.” The boy peers out from under the covers and watches the birds
huddled at the top of his neighbor’s chimney, listens to the wind
whistling through the barren and gray trees, and admires the work of an
ice fairy on his window.

The boy continues his morning routine of getting ready for school.
Several times during his day the question “How cold was it?” is
asked. The query is answered from the point of view of a cat and the
children’s faces, and each response follows the syntactical pattern
shown above. At the end of the story, the boy snuggles under his cosy
blankets and asks, “How warm was it?”

Blue snowflakes outlined on white endpapers set the “temperature”
for this beautifully written and illustrated picture book. The hues of
blue and white in the double-page illustrations, and the characters’
facial expressions and actions, effectively communicate coldness. Vivid
images are created by Barclay’s descriptive and rhyming language used
in the answers to “How cold was it?” Highly recommended.