Eight books for a room learning that a story arrives from somebody, and that the somebody wants something. A five-year-old arguing about whether it's a duck can be in the same lesson as a ten-year-old working out who paid for a headline. But you need to know before you start that this shelf is two shelves. Six of these are picture books about point of view, where everyone is honest and everyone sees something different. Two are instruction manuals about people lying on purpose. Those are not the same subject and I've kept them apart on purpose, because running them together is how a class ends up believing that a lie is just somebody's perspective.
Here's the thing to settle before you plan a single lesson, because everything else follows from it. This shelf is two shelves wearing one coat. The first six books are about POINT OF VIEW. A wolf says he only wanted a cup of sugar. Six mice each touch one piece of an elephant and each comes home with a different animal. A drawing is a duck to you and a rabbit to me. A cat is a cuddle to a child and a nightmare with knives to a mouse. What those books have in common is that nobody in them is doing anything wrong. Six honest mice report six honest observations. The child and the mouse are both looking at a real cat. Nobody is lying, and the disagreement is a fact about where everyone happens to be standing. The last two books are about something else entirely, and the something else is that a person is lying to you on purpose, and there is a reason, and the reason is usually money or power. Those are not the same subject. They are barely even related. And the reason to be strict about it is that a class taught them as one thing learns the worst possible lesson available in this whole area, which is that a lie is just another perspective and everyone has their truth and who's to say. That sentence is where media literacy goes to die. It is the exact thing a person spreading disinformation would like your class to believe, because it means nothing can ever be checked and nothing can ever be wrong. So teach the two halves as two halves and make the seam visible, because the seam is the lesson. Perspective is about position: change where you stand and you see something else, and both of you can be honest. Disinformation is about motive: somebody chose to deceive you and got something for it. The question 'why do you two see it differently?' and the question 'who benefits if I believe this?' are different questions and children can absolutely tell them apart if you name them. Then there's the hinge, and it's the reason the wolf books sit at the front. The three-pigs wolf and the Red Riding Hood wolf are NOT perspective books, whatever the covers say. Nobody's standing anywhere. Those wolves are in trouble and they are talking their way out of it, and both of them have a motive you can name out loud: one is in prison, and the other wants more work. So they look like the first shelf and they behave like the second, and that's exactly why they're worth having. They're where a class discovers that 'my side of the story' and 'a story that helps me' are not the same object. Seven Blind Mice is the control, the clean case with no liar in it at all, and it's the one that keeps the class honest, because if you only ever read fractured fairy tales your class quietly learns that anyone with a different view is working an angle. Duck! Rabbit! is the genuine oddity: the picture really is both, so there's nothing to check and nobody to catch, and that is rare and should be named as rare. And Killer Underwear Invasion! is the one that joins the two halves up, which I'll come to.