I wanted to read this early chapter book and share with all of you this book, because it was the first “chapter book” that got my girls interested in reading those bigger adult-like books.
As a teacher (and parent) it’s great to find books that will build a child’s reading confidence. With the bright and colorful illustrations, speech bubbles, and large font, this book provided a great scaffold for my girls as they made this transition. They read them over and over again.
There are three books in this series. I definitely recommend you add these books to your classroom library!
In this first book of the series, Eva the owl chronicles 11 days in her life. Eva has received a new diary and uses it to record the details of her life, along with sunny drawings and photographs that make her diary more like a scrapbook.
I wanted to respond today to the creative wordplay in this book. We have the teacher, “Mrs. Featherbottom” – who teaching “Winglish” and invented “owlspeak”—Exaggerated words include “flapperiific” and “flaptastic.”
How fun would it be to have students get creative with wordplay in their writing? Graphic novels are all the rage—what if as a writing mentor lesson, we encouraged students to tackle a graphic novel with an animal as the main character? Student then could make a list of pun words for their story which aligns with the animal or main character (like the owl examples above). Imagine the fun and creativity! As a mini-lesson, I could see students working in groups to pick an animal and brainstorm words.
This too reminds me of Roald Dahl books. Have you read any of his books? Matilda, The BFG, and Charlie & the Chocolate Factory to name a few. Dahl is known for his word play-embedding fun, nonsensical words into his stories “Oompa-Loompas” and “whizzpopping” to “humplecrimp” and “zoonk?” Yes, you can even find a curated list of his most scrumdiddlyumptious words here!
My daughter has been on my case about reading my next book, Because of Mr. Terrupt. She was so excited about the first, that we had to rush to Barnes and Noble to purchase the second book in the series!
Until then!
Dr. K.
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