A Tattle-tell Tale: A story about getting help by K. Cole

Abstract

Cole, Kathryn. A Tattle-tell Tale: A story about getting help. Second Story Press, 2016.

This picture book is designed to help kids understand that asking for help from adults does not make them tattlers. The bright colours used make the book attractive to children. There are good visual examples of what bullying might look like in an elementary school setting. These could be used by teachers to spark conversations about bullying. Teachers could ask children questions such as, “How do you think this boy is feeling?” or “How would you feel if someone was doing this to you?” in order to make them more empathetic towards their peers in those situations. The principal in the story also explains that “[w]hen we tattle, we’re trying to get someone into trouble, [b]ut we tell so we can get help.” He makes the distinction between tattling and telling to get help clear and easy to understand. While this is a Canadian publication, there is an unrealistic representation of the multicultural Canadian population. We only see Caucasian and Black characters in the school, which might make it most useful in an area with a high population of Black people. However, Canadian children of East Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, Indigenous or Hispanic extraction will not see themselves represented in this book. The story also renders a simplistic view of bullying situations and solutions to them. In real life, bullying situations are very complex and the problem is seldom completely solved by a student telling an adult who then intervenes only once. Much more time and numerous interventions are usually required. In addition, the situation in the book seems to have gone on too long and escalated too far without supervising teachers realizing what was happening and intervening. Still, this book could be a useful resource for teachers or parents, and it should be available in school and public libraries.

Recommended: 3 stars out of 4
Reviewer: Stephanie Gil

Stephanie Gil is a University of Alberta student of linguistics who enjoys working with children and new immigrants. She spent a year teaching English as a Second Language in Japan to kindergarten and junior high school students.

Shelagh K. Genuis is an Alberta Innovates–Health Solutions Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Alberta’s School of Public Health. Although an avid reader of biography, she has never stopped reading children’s fiction.

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