When my sister (who is two years older than I am) and I were younger, my father would read to us all the time. My favorite book was "Laficadio" by Shel Silverstein. It is a book about a sharpshooting lion who gets picked up for a side show, makes tons of money, and wants to have everything made out of marshmallows. The premise for the book was sublimely surreal and I have always gravitated to that which cannot be explained in either easy terms or lends itself to the ambiguity of abnormality.
If you looked back at the movies I used to watch ad nauseum when I was a kid you would have seen movies like "Beetlejuice", "Little Monsters", "Labyrinth", "Tremors", "Pee Wee's Big Advenutre", "Batman" and "Edward Scissorhands" (are you seeing a Tim Burton pattern here?). Nothing about these movies is real on any discernable level yet they take aspects of the maudlin everyday and throw them into their surrealist twisted world views so that what I responded to as a child (even though I might not quite have known it as this back then) was that the artifice of the cinema as mirroring reality was being played with in terms of its ability to project abnormality onto the screen and into my life.
That was the same with Shel Silverstein's book. I was this strange portal into the world of a lion who liked to growl and eat marshmallows and liked to shoot guns and do tricks and what kid wouldn't like that? As a teacher, I really want to attend to the creative side of my students. I want what most people would think to be strange and weird and abnormal to come out in their writing, their mimicry, their art projects and their interpretations of history so that they are not merely learning the standard, rote limitations often associated with these areas of learning. Presenting them books like "Laficadio" and appealing to that sense of the strange that all children have is just one way in which I can use literacy to achieve that goal in my classroom in the future.