Belinda
This book is best for:
- story retell
- making inferences
- grammar
Review
Old Tom and Bessie live in the beautiful countryside. Old Tom loves gardening and Bessie makes sure there’s always plenty of milk for the household and all the animals. One day Bessie, who goes to visit her daughter in the city, leaves Old Tom to milk Belinda the cow. But Belinda the cow won’t have any of it! Luckily, Old Tom has some clever ideas to get around the problem…
The book, Belinda, provides many opportunities for children to draw inferences. Children particularly love talking about the hilarious ending! This is a fantastic book for children to retell as it has a true narrative structure. It is also great for targeting a range of grammar goals.
See below for a list of all the possible speech and language targets in this book.
Book Details
Narrative Structure: Complete Episode ; True Narrative
Story Plot: Wishing Tale
Themes:
- animals - farm, pets
- clothing
- food/drink
- places - farm
- occupations - farmer
- problem solving
- perseverance
- responsibility
Speech and Language Targets
Speech Sounds:
- /b/ - Belinda, Bessie, butter, bread, bucket, rubber
- /d/ - do, dog, paddock, bread, and, Old
- /k/ - carrot, bucket, milk
- /m/ - milk, moo, mud, Tom, cream, come
- /r/ - every, very, around, carrot
- /r/ blend - bread, breath, cream, dress, grow
- /t/ - Tom, butter, empty, bucket, cat, hat
- Voiced /th/ - the, there, other
- Unvoiced /th/ - with, breath, thud
- /w/ - was, with, what, would, went, warm, white, always, chewing
Grammar:
- action verbs (e.g. give, feed, chew, kick, snatch)
- adjectives
- adverbials (quietly, carefully, gently, cautiously)
- conjunctions (and, then, if)
- copula (was)
- negation (not, no)
- possessive pronouns (his, her)
- possessive nouns
- regular past tense
- irregular past tense (took, gave, set, flew, sat, thought, strode)
- subjective pronouns (he, she)
- third person singular tense
Semantics:
- means to a goal
- obstacles to an action
- inferencing
Concepts:
- descriptive - big
- location - far
- temporal - morning, when, then
Social-Emotional:
- problem solving
Narrative:
- time
- setting
- initiating event
- plans
- direct character speech
- repetition for emphasis
Book Info
Published by Puffin Books in 1992 (ISBN: 9780140556162)