The Girl Who Never Made Mistakes
Written by Mark Pett & Gary Rubinstein
Illustrated by Mark Pett
For ages 4 to 8
- trying new things
- temporal concepts
- regular past tense verbs
- irregular past tense verbs
- metaphors
Review
Beatrice Bottomwell doesn’t make mistakes...ever. She never wears mismatched socks or wears her shoes on the wrong feet. She never forgets to do her math homework and she always makes her bed. In fact, Beatrice is known in her hometown as the Girl Who Never Makes Mistakes. This all changes when Beatrice makes her first mistake… and it happens in front of a packed audience...
The Girl Who Never Makes Made Mistakes is excellent for teaching children that we all make mistakes. We can have a discussion that it is not about the mistakes we make, but how we learn from them that is important. Also, sometimes when we make mistakes we should see the funny side. After all, being perfect is boring! This book can also be helpful for children who are afraid to try things because they think they won’t be good at it.
As well as having a lovely moral, this book can be used to target a range of language goals. There are a couple of metaphors in the book, such as “she felt her stomach jumping inside her” and “the pepper rained down”. The temporal concepts (first, next, finally) are repeated in the book, which outlines the sequence of events. This book is written in the past tense, so it provides many examples of regular and irregular past tense verbs.
See the list below for further speech and language targets.
Book Details
Narrative Structure: Complete Episode
Story Plot: Character Flaw
- animals - pets
- places - school
- trying new things
Speech and Language Targets
- /m/ - matched, morning, math, make, mistake, Millie, muffins, mess, man, music, remembered, amount, stomach, woman, hamster, same, team, from, home, time
- /s/ - socks, Sarah, supper, salt, something, surprised, messy, mistakes, tossed, sandwich, lots, muffins, us, miss
- /s/ blends - school, stop, skating, slip, slide, smile, specks
- Voiced /th/ - the, their, they, the, that, other, brother, father
- Unvoiced /th/ - thank, thinking, everything, math, with
- objective pronouns (her, his)
- subjective pronouns (she, he, they)
- regular past tense (e.g. watched, laughed, looked)
- irregular past tense (began, forgot, won, ate, drew, chose, slept, found, fell, made)
- temporal markers (first, next, finally)
- figurative language - metaphors (e.g. she felt her stomach jumping around inside her; pepper rained down)
- descriptive concept (match)
- temporal concepts (first, next, finally, when, after)
- emotions (surprised, nervous, stunned)
- time
- setting
- problem
- moral
- dialogue
- direct character speech
Book Info
Published by Sourcebooks Jabberwocky in 2011 (ISBN: 9781402255441)