Charlie Cook’s Favorite Book by Julia Donaldson - Teaching Ideas

Reading level: 2.2
Theme/subject: reading 
Genre: rhyming, humorous 
 
I normally list all the reading skills and strategies that work well with a book, but Charlie Cook’s Favorite Book is a different kind of story. This is a circular story that takes Charlie and the reader into one book after another. 
 
The story starts with Charlie Cook reading a book that has a character in his book reading a book. The character in that book is also reading a book and then that character is also reading a book. This goes on and on until it ends with the last character reading a book about Charlie Cook.
What I love about this book is that it has the titles of each of the books with a little summary of what that book is about. With this information you can use this book to look at genre. 
 
After reading the story go back and take a closer look at each of the titles and what each story is about. Use this to discuss the different genre attributes and see if your students can name a genre for each.
The other activity you can do with this story is work on sequencing. It might also be fun to have your students write their own circular story. 

They would have to plan the different characters and what book those characters would be reading as well as what all those stories would be about. This would be quite a task, one that would require some planning and patience,  but just think of the synthesizing that would be happening as they organize, compose, compile and write this story.

Enjoy!