Book Talk #2

This week's book is called This Book Just Ate My Dog! and it's by Richard Byrne.

I love an interactive book! Richard Byrne is a go-to when I'm looking for a book that will draw kids in and get them involved. In This Book Just Ate My Dog!, a spunky little girl is taking her dog for a walk across the page, but the dog vanishes at the middle crease. Things keep going awry as other friends and community helpers also are unable to make it past the middle crease, and the reader is called in the solve the problem. I wonder what literacy building skills can we pull out of this deceptively simple book??

1. Print Awareness

   The left to right directionality of English reading is modelled really well in this book. Since the characters keep disappearing as they walk 'across' the first page and onto the second, readers will be naturally moving their eyes from left to right to see the story unfold. It seems like a simple idea, but for children that aren't reading independently yet, print awareness like this isn't always a given. Children don't often realize that the letters on the page are what an adult is using to tell the story, they most often assume that we are masters at making stories up based on the pictures in a picture book. You can help your learner to build print awareness by pointing at the words as you say them. When you track under the words with your finger, you're showing your learner that the letters on the page are the story, that you always start at the left side and work your way to the right, that words are made up of 1 or more letters, and that words are separated by a space.

   
   

2. Inferencing

   Richard Byrne is a master of the show-not tell rule. Instead of writing "the book ate the dog..." Byrne hints at what has happened. (ex: "...something very odd happened") Not being given such an obvious label allows the reader space to make predictions and inferences about what is going on. They can see that something unexpected has occurred through the pictures, and it sets up a lesson on inferencing really naturally. When you get to a page where something unexpected happens, I challenge you to pause before flipping and say "I wonder what happened?" The answer doesn't have to be 'right,' the goal is plausibility. Does the answer that your learner gave make sense within the story? Could it happen?

   
   

3. High End Vocabulary

   The vocab list that I can pull out of this short book is beautiful; stroll, odd, disappeared, investigate, vanished, ridiculous, appeared, reappeared. For a learner who's already reading and writing, I'd focus on the morphemes that are changing the meaning of appear (dis-appear, appear-ed, re-appear-ed). For a little learner, the verbs stroll, investigate, and vanish would be great actions to emphasize. Try to use those new vocabulary words when you're out and about in daily life - maybe instead of walking to the park, you stroll. Perhaps instead of putting the toys away in the bin, they vanish. The more that you use new vocabulary words in everyday life, the more likely your learner is to make a very strong mental connection between the word that they hear/say and the concept that it symbolizes.

   
   

4. Metacognition

   This is a book about books. It talks about the book as a being, it discusses the book's pages within the story, and the main character writes two different letters addressed to the reader, asking for help. In the same way that we love when a movie breaks the fourth wall, a picture book that knows it's a book is just as engaging for learners. This book asks the reader to engage in unexpected ways, and that will cause a learner's brain to pause for a moment to understand what is going on. "Is that book talking to me?" "Am I the reader?" Metacognition means 'thinking about thinking,' and it's a skill that underpins reading comprehension. You have to constantly be checking on your own thoughts to make sure that you're understanding what you're reading. This book is a good warm up or beginning lesson in metacognition, because it invites the reader to begin thinking about the story as something that they're directly interacting with and thinking about.