And here I am posting about it again. (I recently used this book with a group of students who to practice their reading.)
So for all that, you would think I was a big fan of this book. But truth be told, I never liked this book when I was a kid. I always found it boring, and repetitive, and the ending I thought had very little pay-off.
But, despite my own lack of enthusiasm, it has remained a popular book over the years, and is still in bookstores and libraries everywhere.
And it is good for beginner readers, because of it's simple words and repetition of vocabulary. Which is another reason I used it. (In addition just the fact that it was readily available in my school library.)
Supplementary materials:
Kahoot: I found a Kahoot online that worked well with this book. After my students had read through the book, we played the Kahoot as a reward: Are You My Mother? Kahoot
Objectives: Understanding the main idea of the story
Compare and contrast
Lead-in: Show picture of bird sitting on eggs in nest. Elicit from students what they already know about the picture. Elicit or teach about how birds sit on nest eggs to build background.
Reading: Gist Question: Read story for understanding of main ideas. Introduce the question: “Whose egg is it?” Read story, and then check for understanding.
Reading Skill: Compare and contrast--use this sheet. Which pictures go with birds? Which with alligators? Which with both?
In my class, we read through the book together as an all class activity. Then we did a compare and contrast worksheet. [It's actually all contrast.] I also created a coloring sheet (using Google Gemini) for fast finishers.
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.
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.
