Curious George by H.A. Rey and Margaret Rey

(Graded Reader)

So, this book was a big part of my childhood, as it was a big part of everyone's childhood.

But in this review I'm going to talk about using it in the ESL classroom, and not discussing the general merits of the book.
(I used this book in Vietnam, where the children were completely unfamiliar with the story.  But given how popular this story has been in international translation (W), I probably wouldn't have been able to get away with that every where.)

The book is not designed for ESL, but it is easily adapted.  The beginning especially has a lot of short simple sentences.  "This is George.  He lived in Africa.  He was very happy."

The vocabulary was a bit more problematic.  Words like "harm", "naughty", "wonder" et cetera, were very confusing to my students.  In fact, the very word "curious" (a word not unimportant to this story) was a bit difficult to get across the language barrier.

Nevertheless, despite being a little bit overwhelmed with the vocabulary, my students enjoyed this book.
...for the most part.  Although they did find the ending anti-climatic.
"What?  So he just goes to the zoo?  That's it?  That's the end?"
"Sorry kids, that's the end."

This book is available on amazon.com here.

Here are some supplementary teaching materials I made when teaching this book in my classes.  These materials don't really work too well independently of the actual book, so you'll need to get a copy of the book to use these.

PowerPoint: 1. (slides, pub) 2. (slides, pub) 3. (slides, pub) 4. (slides, pub) complete version: slides, pub

Worksheet: 1. (drive, docs, pub)  2. (drive, docs, pub)  3. (drive, docs, pub)  4. (drive, docs, pub)

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