Dear Deer by Gene Barretta

This is a book all about homophones. Aunt Ant is writing a letter to her friend deer (thus the title Dear Deer). She is telling him about her move to the zoo and all of the things that she encounters there. On every page there is a set of homophones. My favorite, for example, was: "That's HIM, the HORSE who is HOARSE from humming a HYMN." Througout the story the homophones are bolded and in all capital letters just like this line so it makes it easy to distinguish them in the text. The pictures in this book were amazing; they were made by some form of using watercolors but to me they look very crisp and bright! I also thought it was neat how most of the pictures were horizontal but there were a couple that were vertical for emphasis. For example; I know the page about a giraffe was vertical to help show it's long neck. I thought it was a fun way to emphasize certain features in a picture and it was a really nice variation from the standard horizontal pages.

The classroom connection is really obvious here, I think. In a language arts setting this would be a great book for teaching and for discussing homophones. I definitely think students would love this book and it would be fun for them to make up their own funny sentences using homophones.