Category: chapter book

Detective Gordon: The First Case
by Ulf Nilsson (Author), Gitte Spee (Illustrator), and Julia Marshall (Translator)

Booktalk: Someone’s stealing nuts from the forest, and it’s up to Detective Gordon to catch the thief! Unfortunately, solving this crime means standing in the snow and waiting for a long time… If only he had an assistant–someone small, fast, and clever–to help solve this terrible case.

Snippet:
The detective took out a big old-fashioned stamp, placed it on the paper, moved it a little to the right and then a little to the left. Then he pressed. Kla-dunk, it went.

At that the squirrel grew calm and seemed satisfied.

That was a very good stamp, Detective Gordon thought.

The squirrel twisted the handkerchief in his hands.

“Will I get my nuts back?” he asked.

“I’ll investigate the case.”

They went out together into the snow.

Six Traits Mini Lesson

Trait: Conventions How do readers know if a character is thinking or speaking? Quotation marks are the clue.

That was a very good stamp, Detective Gordon thought.

The last word of this line is “thought” but we know this is a thought before we read this word because there are no quotation marks here.

The squirrel twisted the handkerchief in his hands.

“Will I get my nuts back?” he asked.

The quotation marks here tell us that the squirrel is speaking.

“I’ll investigate the case.”

This sentence is on a new line, so that tells us that the other character is answering the squirrel’s question. The reply is spoken aloud, so it is enclosed with quotation marks. We already know that there are only two characters in this scene, so the reply does not have a dialogue tag.

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