For My Children's Book Project: Ugly By Robert Hoge

Cierra Russell

Haynes

PSY-2261

30 April 2023 For my Children’s Book project, I have decided to read and report on the book Ugly by Robert Hoge. This book is a memoir written about Robert’s life. It speaks on the struggles he had dealt with due to being born with multiple physical deformities. The book spans from Robert’s birth to his first few years of high school. It is an inspiring story, with a goal of communicating that it is important to love oneself as they come. I believe that this book would be a good addition to any elementary school classroom. It demonstrates many themes and ideas that are central to learning about middle age child development. As far as the general setup of the text, it seems to be very palatable for young children.

The page setup of the book was spaced out and divided into easily comprehensible paragraphs. The text also included what appeared to be sketched images, which would be helpful to keep a child interested and engaged. The plot of the book built on itself well, and it led to the big picture idea at the end in a very easily understandable way. Every piece of the story that the author provided along the way added an element of deeper understanding, which resulted in a very meaningful end to the tale. Throughout this book, we can see examples of operant conditioning. This type of conditioning includes reinforcing behavior with some sort of action. Operant conditioning usually occurs in early childhood -prior to middle childhood- but can also happen later in life (Belsky, 11). This is present in multiple areas of the text. One of the first examples of operant conditioning that can be seen is when Robert is learning to swim. “I’ve got a Ronald McDonald watch at home, she said. When you swim half the length of the pool , I’ll give it to you.”(Hoge, 75). This task is being presented to Robert, and the task is in place in order to entice him further to do it. In this story we can also observe gender segregated play- a way that

I can see this because he begins to make more critical decisions and it becomes evident that he is utilizing more thought and reason than he previously had. Development of the frontal lobe is a sign of someone maturing, which is what Robert was doing (Belsky, 165). This can be seen with Robert in a multitude of ways. One of which is when he is scolded in the classroom for doing poorly on a writing assignment. The teacher had called Robert and others who had done poorly to the front of a classroom, and proceeded to whip their hands in front of everyone. Instead of reacting irrationally to this situation, Robert demonstrates emotional regulation (Belsky, 172). He kept himself calm and made decisions based on what he experienced and used them to create a lesson instead of a bigger problem. “ Right then and there I decided that what my words meant and said were more important than how they looked.” (Hoge,