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!
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