This wasn't a big childhood favorite of mine, but I have vague memories of it.
Does anyone else remember this book?
It's not technically a Dr. Seuss book (It's authors are Michael K. Frith and P.D. Eastman). But it was published under the "Beginner Books series" which was co-founded by Dr. Seuss (W). Thus not surprisingly the illustrations and writing style are very reminiscent of Dr. Seuss.
The book revolves around a child's plan to teach his dog 100 words (mostly in the form of commands). They start out relatively mundane "dig a hole" and "fill it up". As the book goes on, the commands the child plans to teach the dog get more and more ridiculous, like "feed the mouse" and "mop the moose."
Despite not being designed for ESL students, the book's format of introducing new words with illustrations actually makes it really good for the ESL classroom--or at least, makes it really good for a silly ESL classroom. (Most of my students will probably have very little use for a phrase like "mop the moose" in their future.) It's also filled with the imperative form.
In designing supplementary material for this book, I thought it would be fun to help my students count the words, but I got a bit confused here. It's apparent very early on that the narrator is counting each individual word, rather than phrases. For example, right at the beginning the narrator claims that "dig a hole" and "fill it up" constitutes 6 words. But then by counting every word individually, I found myself ending up with well over 100 words.
I suspect that the counting scheme is that each word counts only once. So for example "a" only counts the first time it is used in "dig a hole" and is not double counted in "catch a ball". I suspect if I went back and counted the words again, keeping track of which words had already been introduced and omitting them from the continuing count, I would end up with exactly 100 words. But I couldn't be bothered to do that, so I just had my count run higher than the book's count. The students invariably noticed this and commented on it. "Teacher, that's more than 100 now!" they would say. To which I would just respond, "Oh. So it is," and continue on.
This book is available on amazon.com here.
I also used this youtube video to supplement the book.
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. (drive, slides, pub)
Worksheet: 1. (drive, docs, pub)
Link of the Day
Surviving the 21st Century
(TESOL Materials--Storybooks ESL Listening)
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