Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak

(Graded Reader)

Yet another book that we're all familiar with, and yet another book that I'm not reviewing on its general merits, but talking about it's suitability for the TESOL classroom.

The language in this book is decidedly NOT graded for  English learners.  There's a lot of low frequency vocabulary (like "gnashed their teeth").
And, something I never noticed before I used this book in the classroom, it uses a lot of run on sentences in which the main subject of the sentence is not always immediately clear.  For example, the opening sentence (which in the book is spread out over several pages)

The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind and another his mother called him “WILD THING!” and Max said, “I’LL EAT YOU UP!” so he was sent to bed without eating anything.

And yet the book has the advantage that all picture books do--the story is immediately evident from the pictures.  Even if there were no words at all, simply looking at the pictures on each page would let you know exactly what was happening.

So, I'm happy to report that my this story held my students attention.

Although, they were disappointed by the ending.  "So, what happened teacher?  Was it all a dream?"

The best I could respond was, "I don't know.  Maybe."

Actually, now that I think about it, I had always been disappointed by that ending when I was a child as well.  As an adult, I don't mind it.  But as a kid, I always hated stories that were all someone's dream.  And furthermore, I always hated ambiguous endings when I was a kid.
Once again, I wondered how many of the popular children's classics are actually geared more towards the adult sensibilities of the parents than those of the child.

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: (slides, pub)--no animation version: slides, pub

Worksheet:  (drive, docs, pub)

Draw Your Own Wild Thing: docs, pub

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