Again for the sake of comparison, THE CAT IN THE HAT 1621 words from a controlled vocabulary of 236. Those 329 words come from a controlled vocabulary of 116 words, and if we can count these as variations of the same word–sniff/sniffing, bark/barking, fetch/fetching, fall/falling, remembered/remember-ing, smile/smiled, frog/frog’s/froggy, play/played, do/doing, and sit/sat/sitting–then we can knock that down to 104 words. I love the friendship here which contains echoes other classic friendships from the Newbery canon: Frog and Toad, Wilbur and Charlotte, Jess and Leslie.įor the sake of comparison, here are some word counts: LIKE JAKE AND ME (2383), FROG AND TOAD TOGETHER (2281), DOCTOR DE SOTO (1114), SHOW WAY (1060), MILLIONS OF CATS (965), and CITY DOG, COUNTRY FROG (329). What do you think? Anyone used this with preschoolers? Or have another picture book to put up for contention? This totally blows the 4 year old mind, as she might suddenly see a telescoping story, forward and back, or imagine the future adventures of Dog and Chipmunk, or grieve for the lack of Frog or… the point is that what seemed like it was heading to a pat and closed ending instead explodes into a myriad of possibilities, delightfully, and with musicality: “But you’ll do.” For here, where the savvy preschooler sees where she thinks she’s being taken (Dog is going to find Frog, right?), she finds instead that Dog has made the creative and mature leap of modeling the friendship that Frog first extended to Dog.
But what makes it rise above for me is the ending, where Willem distinguishes himself in “interpretation of theme or concept” and “delineation of characters” (to call on the award criteria). So the story unfolds, pitched perfectly to a preschool audience.
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