A Giraffe and a Half by Shel Silverstein

Do you like rhyming? Do you like to play with Giraffes? Do you like animals such as snakes or mice? Well, if you do then this is the perfect book for you. A Giraffe and a Half by Shel Silverstein is a cute and somewhat long poem for children. This book incorporates all kinds of fun silly ideas that children will love. This book is fun to sit down with children and read through together.

In the book A Giraffe and a Half, the author goes through a series of events that occur to a very seemingly willing giraffe. He has to handle things such as having a rat inside of his hat and having a chair in his hair or even a spike in his bike that he’s riding with all these other things. In this lengthy children’s poem the poor Giraffe endears all of these things and at the end is finally able to, one by one, be rid of each. He gives his bike with a spike to a scout going on a hike and he told the snake to jump in a lake. All finally until it was just the Giraffe and his little boy friend.

The illustrations in this book are pretty simple yet they give you what is going on each time something in the story happens. For a student who is still learning to read, the illustrations would be of great use to them because you can really see what’s happening without reading the words, so that would be a good aid for younger students still learning to read. There are a few words in here that, for the younger students could be used for vocabulary words. One such words is “saggin’” a student in first grade wouldn’t necessarily know what that word was or what it meant. There are a few other words that younger students would probably have troubles with, so this book is a good way to help them learn that vocabulary.

This is a great fictional poetry book for students. There is nothing realistic in this book and it’s not one that really teaches anything outside of rhyming and maybe some phonics. As I said before, there are also some vocabulary words in this story that would come in handy in the classroom.