There Is a Bird on Your Head!
A teacher’s look at why this book belongs in the Read-to-Me, Read-by-Me stage.
Why it fits Read-to-Me, Read-by-Me (for the kindergarten-ready set, between being read to and reading alone)
Gerald and Piggie speak entirely in speech bubbles a new reader can conquer. The comic timing makes decoding feel like being in on the joke. The Elephant & Piggie series is the finest on-ramp to reading confidence ever built.
What makes it special
Willems engineered these speech-bubble comedies so a brand-new reader performs a two-hander with a parent — reading as duet. The minimalist art puts all meaning into posture and eyebrow, teaching expression-reading alongside decoding. No series has ever made the mechanical work of learning to read feel this much like play.
From the publisher
Gerald the elephant discovers that there is something worse than a bird on your head two birds on your head! Piggie will try to help her best…
About Mo Willems
Mo Willems began as a writer and animator on Sesame Street, where he won the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing for a Children's Series six times between 1995 and 2001. Three of his picture books have been named Caldecott Honor Books, and his Elephant & Piggie early readers have won multiple Theodor Seuss Geisel Medals and Honors.
By his own account the Pigeon simply turned up in one of his notebooks and objected to the books he was writing. He drafted the story in sketchbook form during a sabbatical in Oxford, and his wife, a school librarian, read it to children and persuaded him to try to sell it.
Also by this author: Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! · Knuffle Bunny · We Are in a Book!
More from “I Can Read This Myself”
This book is part of The Best Books for Beginning Readers: 30 Teacher Picks (Read-to-Me, Read-by-Me) in our guide The Best Children’s Books by Age — 120 books chosen by the Montessori-certified teachers at Creative Minds Montessori in Frisco, TX. Come see how we build readers →
Nobody paid for this review — not the author, not the publisher — and the store link above earns us nothing. Our only interest is the reader this book fits.