picture book Archives - Page 683 of 685

Doyli to the Rescue: Saving Baby Monkeys in the Amazon
by Cathleen Burnham (Author)

Booktalk: With the help of her family, ten-year-old Doyli rescues endangered, orphaned monkeys from the perils of native hunters and the black market. At her island home in the Peruvian Amazon, she nurtures the little monkey orphans until they are old enough and strong enough to be released them back to their natural habitat: the Amazon rainforest.

Snippet:
As Doyli swept, she spied a dugout canoe paddling toward shore. Steering the canoe was the Yagua Indian hunter from the day before. Doyli ran down to greet him just as his canoe scraped ashore. Without saying a word, he handed her a limp, red howler baby. She took the monkey, nodded thanks to the Indian, and watched him paddle away.

Six Traits Mini Lesson

Trait: Word Choice An entire scene takes place in these five sentences. The word choices make the scene come alive.

What was happening as this scene opened?

Doyli was sweeping. She saw a canoe coming.

That is a simple way to describe what happened in the first line. For children just learning to read, this very simple explanation would work best. For older fluent readers we can add more words. Let’s look again at what the first line really said.

As Doyli swept, she spied a dugout canoe paddling toward shore.

With word choice, simple verbs are replaced with descriptive ones:

saw changes to spied

coming is now paddling

Adding specific details lets the reader “see” the scene more clearly:

a canoe becomes a dugout canoe

coming turns into paddling toward shore.

The action is still the same. Doyli was still sweeping as she saw a canoe coming. Adding small details with a word choice edit made the writing much more vivid.

It’s Nonfiction Monday!

Trapped! A Whale’s Rescue
by Robert Burleigh (Author) and Wendell Minor (Illustrator)

Booktalk: In the icy waters of the Pacific, a massive humpback whale unexpectedly finds herself tangled in a net abandoned by fishermen. When a rescue boat and a convoy of divers arrive to help the struggling humpback, a realistic and moving encounter bridges the human and aquatic worlds.

Snippet:
The chug-chug of a motor fills the air.
Rescuers. Are they too late?
Divers drop cautiously into the frigid water.

They know the whale is wild.
One quick roll of her immense body can crush.
One blow from her gigantic tail can kill.

TrappedSpread

Six Traits Mini Lesson

Trait: Organization The title of the book, Trapped! A Whale’s Rescue, sets up the way the book will be organized. We know what will happen just by reading the title. The whale will be trapped and then rescued.

This excerpt appears on the page after the whale becomes trapped in the forgotten fishing net. Notice how the events unfold in chronological order.

The sound comes first.

The chug-chug of a motor fills the air.

Then we find out more about that sound.

Rescuers.

At the end of the second line comes that essential, emotional question.

Are they too late?

And then the rescue begins . . .

Divers drop cautiously into the frigid water.

Trait: Organization There is another organization pattern at work in this book. Notice how the text is organized into three line units.

The chug-chug of a motor fills the air.
Rescuers. Are they too late?
Divers drop cautiously into the frigid water.

They know the whale is wild.
One quick roll of her immense body can crush.
One blow from her gigantic tail can kill.

Organizing text into a predetermined number of lines is a poetic device. The Poetry Foundation Glossary defines it this way:
Tercet
“A poetic unit of three lines, rhymed or unrhymed.”

This week’s Poetry Friday Round-up is hosted by Keri Recommends.