I love Anushka Ravishankar’s books. Whether it’s Moin and the Monster or Captain Coconut or At Least a Fish, I find myself chuckling as I read, shaking my head at her wacky humour.
Ana, the protagonist of At Least a Fish, wants a dog. She really wants a dog. But her parents go and get her fish instead – not one, but three! Ana’s friend Zain would call them Fishyone, Fishytwo and Fishythree, but Ana being Ana calls them Socrates, Aristotle (Totty for short) and Plato.
That’s just one of the dozens of crazy things in the story. From a dragon in a filthy pool to a dog who thinks he’s a fish, At Least a Fish brims over with humour and madness. I can’t wait to read it at my reading programme!
Differences
At Least a Fish is such a wonderful book to talk about differences – both obvious ones and not-so-obvious ones. There’s one hilarious page in the book where we have a list of differences between a dog and a fish. There’s also a lovely illustration of a fish mutating into a dragon. What happens there?
From a simple ‘spot the differences’ puzzle to a more thought out list of differences, there’s a whole lot we can do with this idea!
Letters
Ana wants a dog so much that she writes to ‘the person who is charge of reading letters at Adopt-a-pet’. She tries to pretend she is an adult in her letter. I wonder if the children at my reading programme will figure out why she isn’t entirely convincing!
I love working with letters and one of the things I will do at my reading programme is to ask the children to write a letter of their own. Let’s see, depending on whom they choose to write to, maybe I will print their letters and post them. That promises to be fun!
Animals
Ana once adopted a frog and made Zain hide it. She now has three fish. But she wants a dog. What pets do you think are fun to have?
We won’t just discuss pets; we’ll play a game too, one that I’ve played before. I begin by asking children to make a list of ten animals. Then, they make a list of ten things various animals do – a lion roars, a hippopotamus yawns, a frog eats bugs.
Finally, one child begins.
I have a pet. It is a ____
And the next child reads the first animal on their list.
Then, the next child reads the first thing on the ‘verb’ list. The instructions take a while to explain, but the results are always hilarious!
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