Snail & Worm
Published 2016
Snail & Worm is a delightful book about two very different friends who travel through their life adventures together with silliness and humor that younger students will love! The friendship between these two friends will remind readers of Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad and Mo Willems’ Piggie and Elephant. Be sure to help your students compare and contrast between these groups of characters.
Snail & Worm is a perfect mentor text to use with K-2 students for reading and writing workshop!
For reading workshop, I would use Snail & Worm to help readers understand the characters and their motives, help students with solving words, adjusting their reading and their reading fluency. The book actually has three short stories—perfect for students to work on summarizing and inferring, as well.
In writing workshop, Snail & Worm is a perfect example for the younger students to study narrative writing. Snail & Worm can also easily be used to model ‘small moment’ writing, as well. Snail and Worm have quite a bit of conversation in the stories, but the author handles that by changing the color of the font for each character as they talk. This may be a good writer’s move to teach young writers who want conversations in their stories, but aren’t quite ready to tackle using all the punctuation involved with using quotation marks.
This is a small book—so use that document camera to allow your students to fully enjoy it!
Your students will love these silly characters and I suspect….and hope…that Tina Kugler is planning sequels to Snail & Worm!
Book Talk
This is a book talk on the second story in Snail & Worm called ‘Snail’s Adventure’.
Snail sees a flower—a tall flower and decides the he would love to climb it and be tall as well! HIs friend, Worm, happily encourages him to give it a try!
Some Favorite Lines:
OK, I will try. Will you watch me?
Yes, I will watch you.
Here I go!
You can do it! You can climb that tall flower!
I am climbing!
I am climbing!
Go! Go! Go!
When Snail gets to the ‘top’ of the flower, he is thrilled and claims he can that he can see so much from there!
BUT—readers see from the fun illustrations, that as the snail was climbing, the flower actually bent over from the weight of the snail—-so that the flower was touching the ground and the snail is actually about an inch off the ground (but he hilariously doesn’t realize it!)
Snail looks all around—he can see the ants ‘way down’ on the ground and his house on his back.
Finally he realizes something! He needs to get down and turns to Worm to ask, “How do I get down?”.
Fun illustrations will help students understand the humor in the story.
Fun illustrations will help students understand the humor in the story.
Suggested Uses As a Mentor Text:
Book Genre: Animal Fantasy
Reading Workshop Strategies: Character Development, Summarizing, Inferring, Solving Words, Fluency
Writing Workshop Genre and Strategies: Narrative Writing, Small Moment, Strong Endings, Grammar, Boy Hook
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