Animal

Genre
Cumulative tales
Stories in rhyme
Subject
Farm animals
Fleas
Sneezing

Raising a reader :PE #34

Fun rhyming text, but the illustrations are the best. Take a look at how the animals move from picture to picture while they are supposedly asleep. Text is a little long on some pages for story time, but we'll see how it goes. ( )

I like this book for two reasons. I like the poetic style of the story and I like the illustrations. The entire story is a poem about a flea who cannot sleep, with the main repeating stanza being, "Not even the mouse/ He used for a house;/ Or the rat, or the cat,/ Or the black-eyed bat;/ Or the cow, or the owl;/ Or the feathered fowl;/ Or the dog, or the hog,/ Or the old barn frog./ They all slept peacefully -/ But not the flea." In between this main stanza, there is a two line break that does not follow the preestablished rhyme scheme, and it changes the rhythm a little bit, which lines such as, "No one heard his garbled plea,/ "Does eddybody hab a tissue for be?"" The detailed illustrations are found on the pages with the main repeating stanza, and they are different every time even though the animals are all sleeping peacefully. In one illustration, the mouse is on a bale of hay, the fowl and owl are sleeping on the cow, and the frog is sleeping on the hog. When this stanza is repeated again, the mouse is sleeping on the floor, the dog is sleeping on a standing cow, with the fowl sleeping on the dog, the bat hangs from the cow's tail, and the owl is balancing on one foot on the rat. This gives some comic relief to the reader in between the flea's cries for help. In the illustrations, the moon can also be seen sleeping through the barn window or door.
The main moral of this story is to always help a friend in need. No one could hear the flea at first since he is so small and quiet, but after the flea accidentally woke everyone with a sneeze, the mouse he uses as a house gave him a tissue, and everyone went back to sleep. ( )