Book Corner: You Can’t Let An Elephant On The Bus
Let me introduce you to another one of my favourite books I have been using A LOT of late:
Written in RHYME – extra BONUS if you ask me, as we can use it for our speech delayed children as well and/or with our children who struggle to create grammatical sentences, or even just any old sentences will sometimes do, let’s be honest.
What’s it about:
An array of animals, starting with the Elephant who wants to get on a bus of course then onto some Monkeys rioting about in a supermarket, next a Tiger reading the paper on a train, a crazy Seal driving a tax round Buckingham Palace, a Camel on a boat, a Giraffe on a plane and numerous other mad ideas involving unsuitable passengers on the wrong vehicle (or any vehicle come to think of it) until finally on the last page a solution (of sorts) is found for them all…. I leave you to find out what happens
What I love about this book is the mad rhyming that goes on and the super funny illustrations which have even my most inattentive and “ants in pants’ kind of children spellbound and actually looking and listening to the story. Many of my little learners absolutely delight in the mad ideas in this book and I have had some pretty crazy story telling which made us fall about laughing (I always have to laugh when my kids laugh in the session it’s too cute). It’s a great read for thinking about problem solving and WHY something is not a good idea, and what could possibly go wrong – well quite a lot actually!
ENJOY!
Developmental age:
4– approximately 8 years.
Explore these themes:
- Rhymes
- Vehicles
- Actions: poke / push / throw / snore / sleep / read / grasp / float / fly/ ride
- Animals
- Cause and Effect
- Places – bus stop/on a train/in the supermarket
Develop Speech Sounds, particularly good for:
- /f/- elephant. fuss, fat, flat, flipper, feet, roof, giraffe
- /b/ – bus, bottom, bizarre, boots, boat, bony, bike, balloon, basket, bear
- /m/ – monkey, camel, mistake
- /p/ – pig, panic, pain, centipede, plane, pedal, hippo,
- /k/g/ – can’t, tiger, monkey, camel, curve, sink, capsize,
Concepts:
- Sizes
- labelling
- describing
- predicting
- prepositions (in/into/on/ inside/outside)
Emotions
- feelings: determined/bored/scared/naughty/lonely
Published by:
Patricia Cleveland-Peck – From the illustrator of the Mr GUM books. ISBN: 978-1-4088-4982-8.
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