A Little Like Magic
by Sarah Kurpiel
A girl reluctantly accompanies her mother to an ice-sculpture festival, where her discomfort gives way to wonder as she encounters art made from ice. When she realizes that the sculptures will eventually melt, she discovers that something temporary can still leave a lasting impression.
Big Idea
Beautiful experiences do not have to last forever to matter. By noticing closely and preserving an experience through words and art, we can carry its meaning with us.
Discussion Questions
- 1.What makes the girl hesitant about visiting the ice festival, and how do her feelings change during the visit?
- 2.How do the illustrations help us understand what the girl notices and feels, beyond what the words tell us?
- 3.Why might learning that the sculptures will melt change the way the girl looks at them?
- 4.What does the title A Little Like Magic suggest about making art, experiencing wonder, or remembering something special?
- 5.Have you experienced something wonderful that could not last? How could you help someone else understand why it mattered?
Lesson Plan
Learning Goals
- Describe how the girl's feelings change, supporting ideas with details from the words or illustrations.
- Explain how temporary art can create lasting feelings or memories.
- Use sensory details and illustrations to communicate a moment of discovery.
- Experiment with pacing by giving an important moment more space and reading time.
- Sequence a short narrative with a beginning, a discovery, and a reflective ending.
Activity Steps
- 1.Read the book aloud, allowing students time to examine the illustrations. Identify the girl's initial feelings, her growing interest in the sculptures, and her response to their temporary nature.
- 2.Revisit an early spread and a spread showing wonder. Ask students how the text, pictures, and time spent looking influence the reading experience.
- 3.Fold a sheet of paper into three panels labeled Before I Noticed, The Wonderful Moment, and What I Keep. Students choose either an imagined ice-festival visit or a real, short-lived experience.
- 4.Have students draw or collage their imagined sculpture or special moment in the middle panel. Encourage them to include a close-up detail and leave room around it so readers can linger.
- 5.Add pictures and words to the beginning and ending panels. K–1 students may dictate or label; grades 2–3 can write one or two sentences per panel; grades 4–5 can vary sentence lengths and add reflection.
- 6.Partners read their stories aloud, pausing at the middle panel. Each listener identifies one detail that creates wonder and one choice that slows the story down.
Standards Connections
- ELA: CCSS RL.K.3 and RL.1.3 — Identify characters, settings, and major events; describe them using key details.
- ELA: CCSS RL.2.7 and RL.3.7 — Use information from illustrations and words to understand characters, setting, plot, and mood.
- ELA: CCSS W.K.3–W.5.3 — Develop grade-appropriate narratives through drawing, dictation, or writing, with sequenced events and relevant details.
- ELA: CCSS SL.K.1–SL.5.1 — Participate in collaborative conversations, listen to others, and build on shared observations.
- SEL and Visual Arts: Practice emotional awareness and communicate an experience through intentional visual choices.
Printable Teacher’s Guide
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Pace-Write-Read Study with Pace-Write It!
In A Little Like Magic, Sarah Kurpiel makes a visit to an ice-sculpture festival into a story about changing attention. The girl's reluctance matters because it gives her later wonder somewhere to begin. As readers move through the book, invite them to notice when they want to keep moving and when they want to linger over the artwork. Pacing is not simply speed: it is the way a storyteller directs our attention toward what matters. The sculptures also give young writers a concrete way to think about time. Ice art is temporary, but looking closely, feeling deeply, and remembering can extend an experience beyond its physical life. In a Pace-Write-Read workshop, students can borrow this movement from hesitation to discovery to reflection without copying Kurpiel's language. They can plan a small story, slow down its most meaningful moment through detail and visual space, and read it aloud to test whether their audience has time to feel its importance.
| Element | How to notice or teach it in the novel |
|---|---|
| Pacing | Track the movement from reluctance to absorbed looking to reflection on melting. Ask where the class naturally wants to linger and how that lingering helps the girl's change feel believable. |
| Plot | Map the festival visit as a sequence of emotional as well as physical events. The central change is not simply that the girl sees sculptures, but that she comes to value an experience that cannot stay unchanged. |
| Prosody | Read the girl's early reactions and later observations with different tones, using the actual wording as your guide. Discuss how volume, emphasis, and pauses can express a change from resistance to wonder. |
| Word | Collect a few words from the book that convey cold, looking, or feeling. Have students explain what each word contributes before trying an equally precise word in their own festival story. |
| Concept | Explore the idea that temporary things can have lasting value. Ask how the ice sculptures make this abstract idea visible and understandable. |
| Voice & Worldview | Notice how the girl's narration filters the festival through her changing feelings rather than presenting it as a neutral report. Invite students to describe the same imagined sculpture first reluctantly and then with delight. |
| Point of View | Examine the first-person perspective and distinguish what the girl tells us from what readers infer about her mother. Try retelling one moment from the mother's perspective and discuss what changes. |
| Setting & Place | Identify how winter weather and the ice festival shape both the girl's experience and the story's meaning. The setting matters because the artwork's material makes change and melting unavoidable. |
| Original Characters | Build a character portrait from the girl's reactions, attention, and changing emotions rather than inventing a name or backstory. Discuss how an ordinary outing reveals a distinctive inner life. |
| Dialogue | Locate any spoken exchanges and distinguish them from narration. Discuss how conversation can reveal a relationship or provide information without stopping the festival visit for a long explanation. |
| Details | Choose one small visual detail in a sculpture scene and explain why it draws attention. Students can practice slowing a moment by describing one carefully selected detail instead of everything they see. |
| Descriptions | Compare what the words describe with what the illustrations supply about the ice art and winter surroundings. Encourage students to let their drawings carry some information while their writing adds feeling or sensory experience. |
| Firsts | Treat the girl's discoveries during this visit as first-noticing moments without assuming this is her first-ever festival. Ask which encounter first begins to shift her feelings and what evidence supports that choice. |
| Immediacy & Engagement | Discuss how staying close to the girl's reactions helps readers experience the outing with her. Students can begin their stories with a feeling or immediate observation rather than a lengthy explanation. |
| Story Scenes, Summaries & Structures | Distinguish moments that invite close observation from passages that carry readers onward. Map the overall structure as resistance, discovery, and reflection, noting where individual scenes deepen that movement. |
| Tension / Suspense / Surprise | Notice the gentle tension between not wanting to go and finding something worth seeing. The knowledge that the sculptures will melt adds emotional tension rather than a conventional action-story threat. |
| Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger | Distinguish the present festival visit from thoughts about what will happen to the ice later. Do not force a flashback or cliffhanger label where it does not fit; discuss how anticipating disappearance can still shape a present moment. |
| Page Turns and Chapter Breaks | Because this is a picture book, study page turns rather than chapter breaks. Before turning a page, ask what readers expect next, then examine how the following spread extends or changes that expectation. |
| Pace & Creativity | Invite students to imagine telling the entire festival visit in one sentence, then expanding just one moment. Compare how each choice changes opportunities for wonder, detail, and emotional connection. |
| Play | Let students invent ice sculptures using cut-paper shapes and explore what their forms might suggest. Connect this playful looking to the girl's growing appreciation of what artists can make from ice. |
| Performance | Have partners perform a short selected passage while displaying its illustration. Test how looking time and vocal expression affect the audience's experience without adding words to the text. |
| Personality | Ask what the girl's initial reluctance and later attention reveal about her personality. Encourage students to explain their interpretations with a specific action, reaction, or visual cue. |
| Humor | Invite students to look for any amusing expressions or relatable reactions, while recognizing that humor is not the book's main purpose. Discuss how a light moment, if students identify one, can sit alongside a thoughtful theme. |
| Pause | Pause during a sculpture spread long enough for students to discover details independently. Explain that a pause can make room for an emotional response rather than merely interrupting the story. |
| Poetry / Poetic Devices | Use the title's comparison to magic as an entry into figurative language. Ask what makes ice art seem magical even though people create it, and look for other language that invites imaginative interpretation. |
| Repetition | Check the text for recurring words or ideas, and trace the visual recurrence of ice and winter imagery. Discuss whether a return feels different after the girl's attitude changes rather than assuming there is a fixed refrain. |
| Rhythm | Read a selected passage aloud and listen to the movement of its phrases. Students can test how a short statement followed by a longer observation changes the rhythm of their own discovery scene. |
| Punctuation | Examine the punctuation on a chosen spread and read it accordingly. Compare grammatical pauses with the additional looking time invited by the illustration. |
| Questions | Ask what questions readers carry through the visit: Will the girl enjoy herself, and how will she respond to the sculptures' temporary nature? Distinguish these reader questions from any questions explicitly printed in the book. |
| Compare-Contrast | Compare the girl's feelings before and during her close attention to the sculptures. Then contrast the ice's physical impermanence with the lasting importance of the experience. |
| Objects | Study the sculptures as objects that do more than decorate the setting: they prompt discovery and reflection. Students can choose one object to anchor a story about changing feelings. |
| Threes | Use a three-part map—before, discovery, afterward—to organize the girl's emotional journey. Present this as a useful workshop structure, not as a claim that the book uses a repeated rule-of-three pattern. |
| Lists | Make an observation list of details students actually see in a festival illustration. Have each writer select the most meaningful detail, showing how a list can generate material without becoming the finished story. |
| White Space & Negative Space | Look for areas with less visual information and discuss where they direct the eye. Ask whether these spaces make a sculpture, a figure, or a feeling seem especially important. |
| Art & Graphics | Examine how color, scale, and composition communicate cold and wonder. Discuss how Kurpiel's illustrations contribute information and emotion that the written narration does not need to repeat. |
| Interactives & Gamification | The book need not contain built-in game features to support an observation challenge. Invite students to find one detail suggesting cold, one suggesting changing emotion, and one that rewards a second look. |
| Placement | Study where text, the girl, and the sculptures appear on a selected spread. Ask how their placement guides readers between hearing the narration and exploring the artwork. |
| Form | Discuss why the picture-book form suits a story about looking at art. Words, illustrations, and page turns allow readers to experience discovery at a pace that prose alone would handle differently. |
| Dummy | Explain that a dummy is a rough page-by-page model of a picture book. Students can sketch four spreads for their own temporary-wonder story, deciding where a discovery deserves a full spread and a page-turn pause. |
| Passion | Discuss the care involved in creating artwork that will eventually melt and the girl's growing investment in looking at it. Ask students what they would make or describe lovingly even if it could not last forever. |
Pace-Write It!
20-minute Pace-Write-It! task: An Ice-Festival Page Turn. Minutes 0–3: Revisit a spread where the girl attends closely to the ice sculptures; discuss how this differs from her earlier reluctance. Minutes 3–6: Fold paper into a four-page booklet and plan four beats: I do not want to go; something catches my eye; I stop and look; the ice will melt, but the experience matters. Minutes 6–12: Draw an imagined ice sculpture and write an original story following those beats, using a brief opening and giving the discovery page the most descriptive attention; younger students may dictate or use labels. Minutes 12–16: Add one precise visual or sensory detail and revise the final page to show what the narrator remembers or feels rather than simply stating a moral. Minutes 16–20: Read with a partner, pausing before the sculpture's reveal and lingering on its page; the partner names the choice that made the wonderful moment feel important.
Classroom Activities
A Moment Worth Keeping
Students create a three-panel picture story inspired by the girl's visit to the ice festival: Before I Noticed, The Wonderful Moment, and What I Keep. Using paper shapes to design an imagined ice sculpture, they explore how illustrations, descriptive language, and a deliberate pause can turn a brief experience into a lasting story.
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