Diary of a Wombat


Written by Jackie French
Illustrated by Bruce Whatley

For ages 4 to 8

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This book is best for:
  • drawing inferences
  • irregular past tense
  • regular past tense

Review

Follow Mothball, an adorable wombat, as she goes about her week sleeping, eating, scratching, digging holes and training humans to give her food on demand.

Diary of a Wombat is a highly entertaining book. It’s brief, simple text and hilarious illustrations encourage children to make inferences about the story. Children enjoy comparing Mothball’s point of view with what the humans probably thought about all of Mothball’s antics. Diary of a Wombat is written in past tense and contains repetition of a range of irregular past tense verbs, such as ate, slept and dug.

For further speech and language targets in Diary of a Wombat, see the list below.


Book Details

Narrative Structure: Action Sequence

Themes:
  • Australian animals
  • household items / furniture

Speech and Language Targets

Speech Sounds:
  • /d/ - dust, delicious, door, dig, day, cloudy
  • /r/ - rain, carrot, hairy
  • /w/ - wombat, Wednesday, water, wet
Grammar:
  • adjectives
  • regular past tense
  • irregular past tense verbs (slept, ate, went, began, dug, got)
Semantics:
  • predicting
  • making inferences
Narrative:
  • time
Book Info

Published by Houghton Mifflin in 2009 (ISBN: 9780547076690)

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